WITH THE direction in which health and technology are going, it would be prudent for the issue of ownership and access to medical records to be worked out once and for all. With pertinent restrictions of course, access to medical records needs to be less prohibitive to the patient.
I have always been a proponent of telemedicine and its immense benefits to the healthcare system. It is a great way for rural communities to gain access to high quality health care.
Jamaica is far ahead of the United States (US) in certain areas of healthcare. About 20 years ago, Jamaica started the process of digitising the health insurance industry, allowing providers to submit claims online in real time.
Universal access to health has been the buzz phrase for a few years now. When we think of this concept, we tend to think mostly of financial access, but it is much more than that.
Our system is currently skewed to providing financial access to health, which, in itself, is very important as it can be a great barrier to health-seeking behaviour.
We have been tackling the financial barrier with the no-user-fees policy and moved even further along with the recent signing of the consultancy agreement to begin work on the National Health Insurance Plan.
