Hong Kong to spend HK$1 billion on e-health in 10 years

The Hospital Authority will spend HK$1 billion for building an e-health record system for the next 10 years, said Dr Cheung Ngai Tseung, chief medical informatics officer at HA.

Cheung told Computerworld Hong Kong Tuesday that the e-health record project is still in the planning stage, but ongoing scheme like public-private interface for e-patient record (PPI-ePR) serve as tests of the bigger e-health record project.

According to him, PPI-ePR allows doctors employed by Hospital Authority to put patient records with patient consent onto a system. Records are accessed by both HA-employed doctors and private medical practitioners.

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The Hospital Authority will spend HK$1 billion for building an e-health record system for the next 10 years, said Dr Cheung Ngai Tseung, chief medical informatics officer at HA.

Cheung told Computerworld Hong Kong Tuesday that the e-health record project is still in the planning stage, but ongoing scheme like public-private interface for e-patient record (PPI-ePR) serve as tests of the bigger e-health record project.

According to him, PPI-ePR allows doctors employed by Hospital Authority to put patient records with patient consent onto a system. Records are accessed by both HA-employed doctors and private medical practitioners.

Since 2006, patient records have been put online, said Cheung. A doctor need a user ID, a password, plus an RSA token to access the patient records. "When record of a particular patient is viewed, the system sends an alert in SMS format to the mobile phone of the patient," Cheung said.

Up to now, 55,000 patients and 1,200 private medical practitioners in Hong Kong have enrolled in the PPI-ePR scheme, said Cheung. There are around 11,000 doctors in Hong Kong and 5,000 of whom are employed by Hospital Authority, he added.

But the current ePR system doesn't allow doctors from private hospitals and/or clinics to upload their patient records. Cheung said the e-health record will allow both HA-employed doctors and private doctors to upload patient data onto the system.

The Hospital Authority targets to complete the e-health record project in the next 10 years.

Standardization work

At the moment, the HA and other organizations in the healthcare sector are working on record standardization and promoting computerized clinical management to private practitioners.

"Patient records are much more complicated than customer records at banks," said Cheung. "For instance, there are numerous types of diseases and many names for the same disease."

He added that to make e-health record work, interoperability between clinical management systems (CMS) at HA, the one being built for private doctors by the Hong Kong Medical Association, and other CMSes used by some of the local doctors.

According to Clifford Tse, director at Hong Kong-based Mobigator Technology, the CMS under joint development between Mobigator and the Hong Kong Medical Association is funded by the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer.

The CMS development project started last July. When completed, the open-source, OS independent CMS will be available to doctors for free, Tse said.

He added that beta version will be available in March, expecting 120 clinics to join the test by April. "We hope 2,000 to 3,000 doctors will use the CMS in two to three years."

Many of the doctors are still used to paper-based processes, Tse said. "Long-term working habits aren't easy to change. Besides CMSes by foreign vendors are expensive and aren't designed to incorporate practices of Hong Kong hospitals and clinics."