Review of the implementation of electronic health record in Hong Kong

Abstract

eHR is one of the main development area in healthcare sector to ensure a high quality and effective healthcare service in Hong Kong is provided. However, the present development of eHR in Hong Kong is mainly focused on public sectors healthcare providers – the hospitals and clinics under HA and DH. Most of the private hospitals and clinics are still using paper based health records. Although some of them may have implemented their own eHR systems, there is no interconnection among other healthcare providers.

In this dissertation, the eHR system development in Hong Kong for both public and private sectors will be reviewed, to figure out the development of eHR and various clinical management systems, as well as the problems facing by the healthcare workers and patients.

Also, HKSAR government shows supportive to the eHR development both in the governance and financial aspects. To facilitate the coordination of developing her sharing system among different healthcare providers, an eHR Office has been setup under Food and Health Bureau for this purpose. The eHR office will monitor the progress of the eHR development process. As HA has a well-developed world-known Clinical Management System (CMS), which handles patient records in electronic forms in public hospitals daily. HA acts as one major advisor in her implementation for HKSAR.

Data privacy and data security issues are the major concerns of healthcare workers and patients. The Personal Data Protection Ordinance (PDPO) provides protection on the data privacy in legal aspect. However, no legislation on data privacy has been specified for eHR currently. Meanwhile, various physical security protections have been adopted in the implementation of eHR in technology side, which provided a certain level of data security to the system.

Chinese Medicine has been developed rapidly recently, it is expected the Chinese Medicine would become one of the core service area in healthcare sector in Hong Kong, sharing the healthcare service with the Western Medicine. However, there is no integration between Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine in current her sharing system development.

eHR development involves huge investment, to evaluate the feasibility of developing the eHR system, a scientific tool is recommended, a Cost and Benefit Analysis is hence conducted for the eHR in Hong Kong, to compare the effectiveness of eHR with the traditional paper-based health records in the healthcare setting. As recommended from the CBA, the eHR system will be developed with the consideration on the system flexibility and the adaptability from all the healthcare providers. On the other hand, the implementation of the her system will be a long and complex process and will require the contribution and participation from all parties.