Over 3.5 m medical records online
Over 3.5 million medical records in more than 40 government hospitals are now online making it easy and efficient for both doctors and patients to diagnose and receive treatment.
The Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA), the apex ICT institution of the Government functioning under the Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Information Technology has given power to this project, named Hospital Health Information Management System (HHIMS), Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Chairman ICTA noted to the Business Times in an interview on Monday.
“More than 3 1/2 million medical records have been collected and stored in various services in more than 40 government hospitals. A barcode has been given to patients to identify each record. Now the patient can submit his/her barcode to the doctor at these hospitals and their entire medical transaction history comes up on the screen,” he explained. Various large and small state hospitals in the country have adopted HHIMS, but the poster child for this project is Amparai which is very successful, according to Prof. Samarajiva.
One of the biggest hospitals to adopt HHIMS is the Karapitiya Teaching Hospital while National Hospital Colombo (Accident and Emergency section and wards), Out Patient Department; Welisara National Chest Hospital, Ampara Provincial General Hospital, District General hospital – Trincomalee, Vavuniya District General Hospital, Polonnaruwa General hospital and Medirigiriya, Dambadeniya, Galgamuwa, Mahaoya Base Hospitals have also adopted this. Prof. Samarajiva said that the people in Dompe really wanted HHIMS and has embraced it very well. He added that HHIMS is one of the areas that the government is ahead of the private sector.
With this system x-rays are not produced on plastics in this hospital and these documents are located under a cloud server. Prof. Samarajiva hailed the amount of savings that a hospital does by not using physical x-rays through PACS (Picture Archival Communication System) implementation.
Daily an average number of 100 x-rays are used by district, general or base hospitals. Each x-ray costs Rs. 200 and for 25 days it’ll cost Rs. 500,000. “So this will be the average monthly saving for the government per hospital,” Prof. Samarajiva noted.
The patient waiting time has been drastically cut down from two hours to 30 to 40 minutes, he said noting that the introduction of the eChannelling (PPP) further cut down the waiting time.
Prof. Samarajiva noted that now 18 per cent of the population is already registered. He stressed that to make the full use of HHIMS, the country needs data protection laws.
It was revealed that the patients appreciate the improvement in service delivery with the introduction of the health information system.
It was also found that, medical and health staff highly accepted the significant improvements of coordinated and continued healthcare services with accurate and timely information. Prof. Samarajiva noted that HHIMS has a great potential for improving quality, continuity, safety and efficiency in healthcare.