Section 1 What did you learn?
The Forum aimed at raising the awareness of e-health and health informatics, promoting e-health development. There was experience sharing session about project collaboration among Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. In addition, the introduction of new technologies and international standards encouraged cooperation between domestic and foreign regions on medical informatics and internationalization of standards. All these were new to me. In participating in such a large forum, I not only had some understanding of the current e-health advancement in Hong Kong, but also acquired information about the development in other countries.
Section 2 How it can be applied to the health informatics development and/or healthcare/clinical applications? Give example (if any).
I am interested in the application on e-Health Record System development. The Hong Kong Government is going to develop and implement paperless e-Health Record in future. The old age population in Hong Kong is growing fast and many of them have multiple chronic illnesses. The demand for health service is tremendous. I am working in the elderly health service and I found out that most of the elderly lived in old age home. The quality standards of the old age home varies a lot. The implementation of electronic elderly home system will be a possible solution to raise the care standard. This system would provide medical history, dispensing information, diagnosis and drug list. The drug list can be printed out for drug dispensing purpose.
Staff of various disciplines can assess the system to arrange activities without conflicting with other disciplines in booking the activities for the elderly in centre. The speaker reported that the system is designed to be user friendly and can cope with the IT illiteracy, but required minimum knowledge of IT skills such as Chinese input methods. Some private old age home are small in size and personal care workers do not have much knowledge about documentation and proper keeping of patient records.
The system can facilitate the patient record keeping. With the use of alert function that is possibly added to the system, drug dispensing error can be eliminated. Moreover , the visiting medical officers from various organizations such as community geriatric assessment team and private general practitioners can have a detailed picture of the elderly progress from one electronic record. Besides, the possible retrieval of records through internet can facilitate continuity of care when the elderly is admitted to hospital.
The implementation of Electronic Elderly Home Management system to the private old age home could benefit various parties and also the elderly. But extra resources (such as training of staff and purchase of the hardware) have to be allocated to help the private home to implement the system.
Section 3 Suggestions or comments?
The forum was very informative and useful, incorporating sharing of experience among different health care professionals and information technology experts such as doctors, practitioners, informatics experts and solution developers. The forum provided a chance for users, stakeholders and experts to exchange and contribute ideas to create better healthcare and e-health system in future.
I was impressed that the Hospital Authority had done a lot to develop the Health Informatics System. When compared with overseas development, Hong Kong is very competitive and can usually achieve high standard. Hong Kong is in close contact with China and so the experience of Health Informatics Systems development in Hong Kong can facilitate China’s similiar development in future.
Health Informatics development in organizations with adequate resource is not too difficult. But for small organizations such as small private old age home, the government have to put resources to assist them in developing their electronic health systems. This is very important to prevent the great discrepancies among various health care organizations.