"Patients First" Healthcare Services with Electronic
Medical Record Exchange

In today's world, Infocomm technology wizardry can solve puzzling medical cases within seconds. Take the case of a 35-year old housewife who had a drug overdose. Armed with the woman's name and identity card number, and the knowledge that she had just been discharged from another hospital the previous day, the doctor tapped into a computer system and found out what drugs that she had taken. Providing a remedy, the woman was soon declared out of danger.

This computer system is the Electronic Medical Record Exchange, or EMRX and it is proving to be a lifeline to the hundreds who pack the hospital emergency units since its launch in April 2004. The EMRX allows all public hospitals and polyclinics in Singapore to share patient records online.

EMRs are essentially electronic versions of paper-based medical records. But unlike paper-based medical records, digitised versions can be easily shared online across IT-enabled healthcare institutions. This will contribute significantly to improved patient care outcomes.

First, it facilitates higher patient safety and quality of care. Quick and easy access to the medical history, and laboratory and other test results of a patient allows more thorough assessment in less time and with greater holistic accuracy. This is especially important in the Accident & Emergency setting where a patient could be unconscious when admitted and immediate, accurate access to vital information such as pre-existing medical conditions, drug allergies and current medications can significantly aid treatment. It will enable doctors to make more accurate diagnoses and prescriptions. Second, it enables our hospitals to provide better co-ordinated care, especially when a patient moves across different hospitals and levels of healthcare delivery. EMRX allows the physicians to better co-ordinate their treatment. Third, it will reduce costs for patients, as ready access to information such as laboratory test and x-ray results will eliminate unnecessary repeat orders for identical tests by doctors in different institutions.

The Singapore EMRX embraces diversity with the heterogeneous solutions already in place or being planned for the hospitals. This flexible approach using web services allow for different workflow of the hospitals and clusters that best suited the healthcare professionals. The EMRX system provides:

• Hospital Inpatient Discharge Summaries
• Medical Alerts and Allergy information
• Medication information.

With EMRX, doctors from the two clusters are now able to retrieve EMR from other institutions on the fly, even during consultation with the patient. Doctors do not have to log into a separate system as the seamless integration enables doctors to retrieve cross cluster records from their existing system.