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Healthcare IT

Private doctors key to e-health uptake in Hong Kong

By Robin Hicks | 25 November 2010

To realise its vision for a complete, territory-wide electronic patient records repository within five years, the Hong Kong Hospital Authority needs buy-in from the 70 per cent of private doctors who are yet to embrace ePR.

All patient records should be available electronically to every doctor in Hong Kong through a dedicated e-health portal within three years, and to all patients by 2015, noted Dr C. P. Wong, Co-Chairman, Clinical Informatics Programme Steering Committee, Hong Kong Hospital Authority.

But although 100 per cent of doctors in the territory’s 44 public hospitals are using the ePR system, only 30 per cent of Hong Kong’s 4000 private doctors are doing so too, he pointed out.

“It is proving difficult to persuade private doctors to use the system, particularly solo general practitioners. It’s less of a problem with private hospitals, which rely heavily on IT and are keener to share data,” he said.

Around 60 per cent of healthcare transactions are currently made through the ePR system - which amounts to 750 terabytes of data. HA is aiming for 80 per cent of transactions by 2013, and 100 per cent by 2015.

“Health IT tends to bring out the flaws in healthcare, such as poor prescribing habits, which could be one reason for the resistance,” said Wong, who is also President, Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics.

HA is using a unique approach to encouraging private doctors to enroll in the ePR system. When private hospitals receive patients from public hospitals when capacity is stretched, private doctors must enter these patients into the system if they are to get reimbursed.

“Every year, 20,000 patients are sent to private hospitals for cataract surgery. Each operation costs HKD7000 (US$900). To receive this money, private doctors have to use our system,” Wong explained.

To date, US$148 million has been allocated to the ePR system, “with more to come”, according to Wong. No official budget for ePR has been released by the government this year.

“It took us ten years to persuade all of Hong Kong’s public hospitals to share their systems. We eventually consolidated 44 data centres into a single database for all of our public hospitals. With the ePR repository, it’s a long road too, but we’re getting there.”

Next year, Hong Kong’s hospitals are to go 100 per cent filmless, with digital imaging machines replacing traditional imaging equipment. Currently, 70 per cent of all medical images have been digitised.

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