Delays loom with move to electronic records

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Setting up electronic medical records could lead to registration and booking delays in one hundred hospitals and clinics.

Registration and booking delays are expected at more than one hundred public sector facilities across the Emirates in the next three years, following the move to an electronic patient records system, MT can reveal.

Last month, newspapers reported that patients at Al Corniche Hospital in Abu Dhabi were facing long delays, as staff got to grips with its new e-health system.

The maternity hospital is using a state-of-the-art system developed and installed by Cerner Corporation. The same sytem will be used by the widely publicised Ministry of Health (MoH) electronic health record project Wareed, announced three weeks ago.

The MoH scheme will link up all 14 federal hospitals and 68 affiliated clinics in Dubai and the northern emirates.

The system had been installed at Al Corniche Hospital in August, but front line staff are still having difficulty with the booking programme. Patient registrations are taking up to 40 minutes to complete, a spokesperson for Abu Dhabi Health Services Company (SEHA) confirmed.

The system has also been introduced at three other health authority-run hospitals in the capital and is being rolled out to 60 clinics managed by SEHA, according to Najati Ali-Hasan, client result executive for Cerner Middle East.

"The same software system for medical records will connect all hospitals and that is the point," he said.

"It sat in with Wareed, and they looked at what we were doing in Abu Dhabi and it was an easy decision for the MoH."

The problems at Al Corniche Hospital are "transitional", and once the system is fully up and running it will improve the quality of patient care on offer, a SEHA spokesperson added.

E-records will allow doctors quicker access to patient's notes, provide more accurate histories and remove the need for people to re-register every time they attended a different facility, health minster Humaid Mohamed Al Qutami said at the launch of Wareed.

However, patients and staff in Abu Dhabi should be prepared for similar delays at other clinics and hospitals over the next few months, the SEHA spokesperson said.

"Once we get over this hump it will be fine. But it may take three to six months.

"It's going to change, but at the moment everybody has to learn how to step into the 21st century."

It will be mid-2009 before the first hospitals go live under Wareed and completion is scheduled for 2011.

No official comment was available from Cerner Corporation as MT went to press.

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