Electronic health record (EHR) systems - or hospital information systems - should be designed to provide continuous longitudinal records of the patient, from a person's birth right through until their death.
This was the message from IBA Health's Martin Wilkinson, a veteran in the field of e-health, on day one of ITWeb's IT in Healthcare conference in Johannesburg last week.
"In SA, as in Australia and many other countries with a large population spread over vast geographies, the challenge is to provide a high quality of care in conditions not that conducive to doing so."
Aside from being able to track a patient "from cradle to grave", the EHR must be accessible, secure, and able to interact with existing repositories of clinical records.
Wilkinson pointed out that value-added systems - like peer group information, care pathways, knowledge bases, clinical alerting - all help to increase the effectiveness of the implementation.
"The health record information must be available on any device, at any time in any place. You need to be able to push clinical records to smartphones - and be able to complete online, real-time updates of medical records.
He says there will always be specialised systems (for cardiology or oncology, for instance), and niche technology players catering for these specialised needs. "So the integration of systems has to be a fundamental part of any implementation process. Too many people have failed because of this."
Deploying the right systems is a daunting prospect, he told delegates, offering the following key points he feels should be included in a national or regional "smart-health" programme:
* Understand project strategy - "often people get funding, but they don't know why they are adopting technology in healthcare".
* Understand the benefits you are trying to achieve - and keep the senior management briefed.
* Ensure user awareness - keep people informed via user awareness workshops and Intranets.
* Align workflow and the technology to what you want to achieve - and don't cut the training budget.
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