Hospitals seek to ditch paper records for electronic data
The benefits of electronic medical records to healthcare providers include better, faster communication and more effective service. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH
It has been a tedious routine for patients visiting a clinic or hospital for the first time or for repeat consultations.
The nurse asks for your details, which in most cases is the hospital card or your identification card. They then disappear into the records room to fish for your file, a process that may keep you waiting for up to 15 minutes on a busy day.
This is the reality in most hospitals, well, apart from a few which have embraced the digital electronic data systems.
Electronic health records (EHR) is the electronic version of patients medical history maintained by the provider and includes administrative clinical data of a particular person every time they get treatment.
With electronic health record system, a patient only walks into a hospital and gives his details on the card which are then keyed into the system.
Betty Gikonyo, Karen Hospital CEO, says the integrated health record management system has been of great benefit as it has been easy to retrieve information on the patients from the system therefore reducing time spent at the hospital.
“The accuracy of diagnosis is improved using electronic health management systems as well as reduced cost of health care as no tests are repeated if we already have the records in place,” she says.
A patient who walks into a hospital which uses EHR can walk into the consultation room, pay for the tests, head to the lab for examinations, go back to the doctor’s office for a diagnosis and get a prescription at the pharmacy – all without having to carry any prescription notes as the communication is all done online.
On the other hand a patient who waits in line for their file from the records store and has to carry the file to every department might get frustrated by the delay in paperwork.
Most Private hospitals such as Aga Khan University Hospital, Karen Hospital, Gertrude Children’s Hospital, Neema Uhai Hospital and Meridian Medical Center have already invested in softwares for EHR.
At the Aga Khan University Hospital, the Electronic Health Management System was put in place years ago as well as a picture archiving system which keeps records of patients’ X-rays, CT scans, MRI scans and Ultra Sounds.
Daniel Yumbya, the CEO of the Medical Practitioners and Dentist Board, says the board encourages electronic health record keeping in hospitals but they also need to keep notes from doctors and the lab.
“We encourage hospitals and doctors to run both systems of record keeping as we are not yet at a point of using EHR only,” he says adding, in case of litigation the board will use paper files as evidence since they contain the doctors’ signature.
It is a requirement for hospitals to keep patients’ records in files for a minimum of five years.
Government hospitals are also embracing this technology, with the Nakuru Provincial General Hospital being the first government such facility to start electronic health record- keeping, followed by Naivasha General Hospital.
The Armed Forces Memorial Hospital in Nairobi has also adopted the electronic record keeping system.
Although the medical board has not started giving certification for the electronic health systems, they say it is beneficial in the government’s data collection.
Dr Gikonyo says with these systems in place, data collection for research will be made easier, especially when doing returns to the ministry of health on statistics of diseases treated in the hospitals.
Various software products are available in the market from Patients Care, and OHS. All these institutions are running their own E-Systems from various software companies.
Dr Gikonyo says they outsourced software from India called Insta Health Solutions which they have used since September 2012 and is being used in 50 other hospitals across the world.
At the Aga Khan hospital, the software makes it possible to share patient’s information and medical records with their 47 satellite medical centres which give the patients liberty to get medical care wherever they please while at Karen hospital, the information is accessed in all their nine branches countrywide.
In developed countries, these systems have been in place for years, but now patient advocates in the US are campaigning for a system where patients can have access and take control of their health records instead of leaving the doctors with all the information.
The Get My Health Data campaign hopes to get patients to ask doctors for their health records for their own benefit if they want to consult other specialists when seeking second opinions unlike when the data is locked to only one medical provider.
An article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last year dubbed How to Take Charge of Your Medical Records talks of how leaving health records in the hands of doctors and hospitals is a big mistake as it gives them too much power over information that is vital to patients thereby creating chances for error.
According to Mr Yumbya, information-sharing is crucial and patients should not be denied access to their records whenever they decided to seek treatment elsewhere. “The National Patients Right Charter 2015 talks of the patient’s right to a second opinion as well as their right to their medical records,” he says.
Under Article 35 of the Constitution, patients also have a right to receive information about their treatment. If a patient requests to know the type of treatment he is undergoing, he should be told.
One of the most sought- after is the Microsoft Health Vault, a web-based personal health record that stores and maintains medical information for healthcare providers.
