Explanations such as “My prescriptions got wet in the rain and are no longer readable,” “I lost my medical records while shifting” are not unheard of but with introduction of Electronic Medical Records (EMR), a repository of electronically maintained information of an individual, these issues, including others related to the medical documents, will be a thing of the past in the hospitals in the Valley soon, starting from Patan Hospital. [break]
Initiated by Medium Health Care and Multipurpose Pvt Ltd, EMR is a specific kind of Microsoft-based software under the Health Care Information System (HCIS) that holds records of a patient’s health status such as tests required, allergies, prescribed medication, x-rays, digital prescriptions along with administrative information such as admissions and discharge date, follow-up appointments and so on. “With the help of EMR the information can be accessed by multiple users as easily as swiping a card,” says Manish Shahi, Chief Operating Officer at Medium Health Care“
“EMR will hold all the detailed information of a patient which can be accessed anywhere in the hospital with the swipe of a card and will, in the long run, decrease the number of deaths caused by misdiagnosis, medical transfer and human error,” says Prajwal Raj Joshi, Chief Technological Officer at Medium Health Care.
Similar to banking concept but for medical data, the data fed into the EMR system of the patient is interchangeable between departments in hospitals and in the long run between different hospitals.”
“We are currently in the process of holding talks with other hospitals in Kathmandu to adopt this system which in the long run will help build a network making it easy to access information, by authorized users, from different hospitals,” says Joshi.
The system will come into use within two weeks in Patan Hospital as soon as the staff is oriented on it, confirms Shahi.
Apart from storing medical data and increasing efficiency, EMR also helps in saving paper and monitoring financial dealing within the medical institutions. “The paper-based financial dealings can have ups and downs if not recorded but in the case of EMR they can be easily monitored as the system will not allow testing without data input,” says Dr Arjun Karki, the Vice-Chancellor of Patan Academy of Health Science. Patan Hospital is currently incorporating the system phase-wise, starting from the administration and the business sections.
Though Tribhuwan University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) does implement the EMR system partly with regard to admission, discharge and store inventory, it is yet to fully incorporate the services“
“We are in the process of agreeing to scan the records of past patients and plan to electronically record the details of the new patients from now onwards,” says Professor Dr Pradeep Vaidya of TUTH’s Information Technology Department. “It will take one to two years to incorporate the entire system as the whole package is very expensive,” he added.
Medium Health Care at the moment is in talks with major hospitals in Kathmandu like the Maternity Hospital, Kanti Bal Hospital, Shahid Gangala Heart Hospital, Manmohan Memorial Community Hospital among others. “The software package can be customized as per the need and the budget of the hospitals,” says Joshi.
“Our goal is to provide easy access to health care, first in Kathmandu and eventually in whole of Nepal.”
Related story
Heart to Heart with Malvika
