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Source: www.gov.sg |
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MOH Budget Speech (Part 2) -
Transforming Healthcare |
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By Mr Khaw Boon Wan, Minister
for Health |
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Venue: Parliament |
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An Excerpt |
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First: an important infrastructure is the
Electronic Medical Record (EMR). |
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I have coined the slogan, "One Singaporean,
One EMR" to catalyse this initiative. |
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Right now, it is one Singaporean,
multiple medical records, stored away in different clinics and
hospitals in different formats, and not connected or consolidated.
As a result, when patients visit different doctors, they have to
have tests repeated and scans redone. This adds to unnecessary
cost. |
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We are moving towards this target of
"One Singaporean, One EMR". Because of legacy systems, we cannot
achieve it in one step. But we have made progress. |
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As pointed out by Dr Lam Pin Min,
public hospitals now have the EMR eXchange (EMRX). We achieved a
first but important psychological step in 2004 when public
hospitals began to electronically exchange their Hospital
Inpatient Discharge Summaries. |
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Since then, we have made the EMRX more
comprehensive, by adding other patient records such as laboratory
tests, radiology reports and medication information. The
electronic volume of laboratory results exchanged has grown 7
times in 2 years. Thousands of patients benefit from EMRX every
month. |
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Our doctors' feedback is that EMRX has
made their work easier. |
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In particular, our Emergency
Department doctors have said that the EMRX gives them greater
reliability and confidence in treating patients, especially those
with long and complicated medical histories. |
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Extending EMRX to private doctors will
be a natural step and is the objective. |
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As Dr Lam pointed out, a National EMRX
will minimise unnecessary medical investigations. More
importantly, I see EMRX playing a critical role in the integrated
delivery of care to patients. |
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However, this is a complex national
project - very few if any countries have successfully implemented
a system that links up public, private and the charity sector. |
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This is because there are many issues
such as data protection, regulation and audit to be addressed. We
need to take a measured approach, to pilot and put together a
comprehensive framework that takes care of these issues. |
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This will begin with common data
standards. We will do this within the public sector, and extend
this to the step-down institutions. |
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We have started to build the linkages
to the private sector GP clinics by helping them to set up their
IT systems under the Chronic Disease management effort. I am
confident that we will get there... |
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Full Text of
Speech |
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Source:
www.moh.gov.sg Press Release 6
Mar 2007 |
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FrontPage Edition: Mon 12 March 2007
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