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Healthcare

Hong Kong invites private care providers to join EHR

By Jianggan Li | 26 October 2009

The Hong Kong Government has invited private healthcare providers to join the Electronic Health Record Engagement Initiative (EEI).

Under the plan, private care providers will be allowed to choose health IT systems that best suit their clinical requirements.

In the meantime, Hospital Authority (HA), the custodian of the territory’s public healthcare system, will allow private care providers to adopt its internationally-renowned Clinical Management System. The government will make adaptation to the CMS so that components can be implemented in private hospitals to meet their IT needs. In the meantime, a light version of the CMS, called “CMS on-ramp”, will be available for private clinics and ancillary services.

HA’s CMS currently holds 8 million records, 800 million lab reports, 340 million prescribed drugs, 34 million x-ray images. There are around three million transactions per day through the system.

The government will be developing the eHR Sharing Infrastructure, including core components such as eHR Person Master Index (PMI), eHR validation platform, security infrastructure and doctor’s portal.

A Clinical Data Repository and data warehouse will also be designed and built to store centrally-held health records, although it is not yet specified which level of details these records will contain. The government document also lists the components of the standardisation and interfacing projects.

Two sharing sessions of stakeholder forum have been held on October 15 and October 22 respectively, where more than three hundred stakeholders from private healthcare and IT industries participated and shared their concerns.

Five potential partnership models have been specified by the government, depending on the level of ehealth adoption in specific private organisations.

During the sharing sessions, concerns were raised on security arrangement while interfacing different systems, migration of existing data as well as Chinese language records capture and display.

The government expects initial proposals to be submitted by 29th December 2009, and the final proposals, after evaluation, to be handed in by 9th February 2010.

It is not mandatory for private care providers to accept this invitation, implying that private care providers can opt not to share their records.

“Lack to legislation makes the job harder for the initiative,” an insider told FutureGov. “The critical success factor will be massive majority of private providers jumping on the bandwagon.”

The forum was organised by the eHR office, which was formed when the Legislative Council approved the budget of HK$720 million (US$93 million) in July this year for the first phase of the eHR implementation.

Administratively under Food and Health Bureau, the eHR office is commissioned to ‘spearhead and coordinate’ the overall eHR programme. It is headed by Janice Tse and consists of experts in eHealth and public-private-partnership. The office also has a Chief Systems Manager in charge of developing the infrastructure.

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