[The physician's different roles and responsibility for the patient's medication list]. / Läkarens olika roller och ansvar för patientens läkemedelslista.

A common understanding of roles and responsibilities regarding both individual prescriptions and the patient's full list of treatments, including the responsibility for monitoring of treatment, is necessary to have for physicians treating the same patient. Qualitative studies of attitudes expressed by Swedish physicians have identified at least four different roles of a physician when prescribing drugs. A model on how to share responsibility in different situations of drug prescribing is described. The described model on how to share responsibilities between different physicians treating the same patient with drugs constitutes the basis for a joint recommendation by the Swedish Medical Association and the network of Swedish Drug and Therapeutics Committees.

Systematizing medical alerts.

The current Swedish regulations for medical alerts in health records were designed for paper records. Suggestions for computerized systems are now being investigated. A proposed model using three alert categories, graphically represented using three directions, probably combined with three severity levels is presented here. Up represents hypersensitivities, left/back represents alerting diagnosis and right/forward represents alerting current and planned treatments. A small qualitative user study of the alert classification model and some graphical representations of it was conducted. One main finding is that most respondents found the use of directions intuitive as a means of presenting categories. Context dependency, information overload, and future possibilities for automated alert-gathering are also discussed in the paper.