ONE of the island's leading advocates for the digitisation of medical records, Doug Halsall, has given the Government his nod of approval for its decision to approve a $780-million contract to implement the second phase of its electronic health record (EHR) management system.
The EHR system is being designed to streamline Jamaica's public health sector and create greater efficiency through the use of technology.
What if all of your healthcare providers could view your complete electronic medical record (EMR) before recommending treatment for the individual issue that they may be dealing with?
For example, it is often said that many illnesses can be first diagnosed through dental issues. Things like diabetes, for example, become apparent first in the oral cavity. Similarly, that and other non-communicable diseases can cause issues with the eye.
There’s a wealth of data in healthcare that can be used to determine how to manage many other areas. For example, an illness in a geographic area can alert health managers to a problem plaguing people specific to that community. This may have an effect on issues such as productivity and mental health. Solving this problem will have positive economic, social and health benefits.
The long wait for non-emergency healthcare, both privately and publicly, can be frustrating. Such is the extent of the problem that, some years ago, the Ministry of Health began to focus specific interventions on reducing waiting times at public-health facilities. Still, waiting time remains a problem, which I don’t believe we will be able to effectively tackle without the help of technology.
Jamaica began its hospital digitisation journey less than a decade ago with the University Hospital of the West Indies. At that time, they saw the economic and efficiency benefits of such a move. Increasingly, more hospitals worldwide have been on a similar journey, and the ones that have gone fully digital have been investing more to improve how they offer services to patients and other clients.
Every business seeks to remain sustainable throughout development and change in society. It’s no different for those in the healthcare industry. With the advent of and rapid development of technology, many healthcare-related businesses have either had to change to stay afloat or develop new areas of endeavour to remain competitive.
Two weeks ago, my company, Advanced Integrated Systems, participated in the 16th annual Caribbean Neurosciences Symposium in Montego Bay, St James.
I was happy to be a part of this event, given its history of facilitating inventiveness and new methods of operation. It also helped that it was led by the always-forward-thinking Dr Carl Bruce and cosigned by the University of the West Indies (UWI).
The state of emergency in the parish did not deter attendance as participants hailed from all over the world and gathered at the Montego Bay Convention Centre.
