Electronic medical records deployed by Nhân Dân Gia Định Hospital are viewed on a smartphone. Photo courtesy of the hospital

HCM CITY — As of September 26, 153 hospitals in HCM City have replaced paper-based medical records with electronic medical records (EMR), reaching a rate of more than 93 per cent of the city’s entire healthcare system, according to its Department of Health.

The city has 164 hospitals following its administrative merger with Bà Rịa-Vũng Tàu and Bình Dương provinces, including 60 public hospitals, 14 ministerial and sectoral hospitals and 90 private hospitals, according to the department.

To date all public hospitals, including 32 general hospitals and 28 specialised hospitals, have deployed EMR in line with the health sector roadmap.

As many as 80 private hospitals have implemented EMR.

Thirteen ministerial and sectoral hospitals have implemented the system.

Most hospitals chose to hire information technology services to optimise costs, said Assoc Prof Tăng Chí Thượng, director of the department.

EMR had brought many practical benefits, including shortening the waiting time for medical examination and treatment, reducing costs and administrative paperwork, increasing transparency in management and improving the patient experience, Thượng said.

However, hospitals were facing many difficulties in development of information technology infrastructure, IT human resources, and the operation cost of EMR, he said at a conference held on Friday.

The implementation of EMR is a mandatory task assigned by the Government to be completed in September.

The health sector would continue to expand the deployment of EMRs to all medical facilities, standardising the centralised medical data warehouse to ensure connectivity, he said.

Huge investment

At Nhân Dân Gia Định Hospital, the EMR system approved by the Ministry of Health has been operating since January this year.

Dr. Huỳnh Văn Bình, head of the hospital’s general planning department, said that it began building EMR in 2006 and had implemented comprehensive EMR throughout the hospital since earlier this year.

The hospital had completely abandoned paper-based medical records by applying electronic records in medical examination, treatment, and health management, Bình said.

The adoption of EMR has brought many positive changes, according to Bình.

Patient records are stored on a system and are easy to retrieve when transferring departments or returning for re-examination.

With EMR, patients can easily check old medical records without bringing paper records when visiting doctors for follow-up examinations, and receive results right on their phones.

As a tertiary general hospital, a huge investment is required to deploy EMR.

In addition, the operation of EMR requires synchronous coordination and close connection between departments and rooms as well as training for medical staff.

He recommended that priority should be given to developing information technology infrastructure in first-grade and special-grade hospitals.

He emphasised that it was vital to promote the connection of national health data so that EMR could play a role in comprehensive and continuous health care. —VNS