The eHealth Strategy can only succeed, with a concentrated, disciplined approach to standardizing information and processes.
The heart of Patient centric systems is sharable data, and this can only be achieved by standardizing the systems being used, and the information exchange standards that allows them to inter-operate.
A significant eHealth benefit, is the immediate availability of complete data, for clinical decision making, health system management, and research and trend detection. This benefit too, depends on the standardization of information management.
The eHealth strategy focuses on enabling key integration points, which span facilities and regions (and potentially other health delivery organizations) to enable data exchange and sharing across of a diverse range of data, such as:
Admissions and demographic data for patients.
Orders for ancillary departments such as Laboratory and Radiology.
Reports for diagnostic tests such as pathology and radiology.
Radiology and other Images.
Clinical documentation, including progress notes, discharge summaries.
Summarized health history, including past diagnosis.
Medication prescribing and dispensing.
Allergies, immunizations.
By applying standards in these areas, including clinical terminologies and secure communication standards, accurate automated communications between systems, facilities and regions will be possible, providing the foundation for an interoperable electronic health record, as well as contributing to the ability of the MOH to perform data mining, knowledge management and health sector management and research analytics.