Electronic Health Records Give Better Health Reports

KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 25 (Bernama) -- There is a need for Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Health Information Technology (HIT) to be put in place aimed at ensuring that the patients' demographics and past treatments could be determined which would assist doctors in giving them better healthcare.

Dubbed as the father of HIT, Prof Dr William Edward Hammond, who chairs the Health Level Seven Executive Committee responsible for developing data interchange standards, said the current data system was fragmented and at times contained incomplete and unreliable data.

"We are still held back by the past system. Our data input is more akin to normal paperwork. The current system is more of a summary discharge via paper, which is simply something to jog a doctor's memory on the patient's past treatments and healthcare," he said in his keynote address at the Healthcare Information and Management System Society (HIMSS) AsiaPac 09 Conference and Exhibition, here today.

"We need to move past this and take advantage of the current information technologies and move into real-time data input," he said in his paper titled 'A New Age Technology: An EHR For All the World'.

The paper emphasised on the need for EHR and HIT, a system that could integrate patient-care data with the capabilities to process knowledge for cognitive support of both providers and patients.

He said EHR should also empower patients to become more involved in their personal healthcare and "at its pinnacle, the system would be science fiction made into reality where it can advise a person on their diet and exercise as well as their next medical checkup."

"EHR and HIT must be able to personalise a person's health. It should be able to identify risk factors of an individual based on the person's family, socio-economic situation, environment and mitigate as best possible on the risk factors," he said.

Dr Hammond also believed that this system must be able to inter-correlate on a global scale, and stated such funding should be a global funding rather than nation-based.

"Nations must work together on this. Nations must level the playing field and make it equal for all. We are seeing and will continue to see more and more mobility of disease.

"As humans continue to be more mobile, so will the disease. If the playing field is not levelled, healthcare in any nation could be jeapordised," he added.