Electronic Patient Record System in Hamad Medical Corporation, Qatar: Challenges and Improvements

Abstract

The concentration in healthcare information technology increases as hospitals realize the importance of utilizing Electronic Patient Record (EPR). Also Qatari’s healthcare system realizes the importance of EPR and aims to improve current patient record system in hospitals in Qatar including Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC) hospitals.
The challenge for EPR is to supply health providers and medical researchers with a complete view of health status in HMC in general. To achieve that it is needed to overcome some obstacles such as: interoperability which happens when patient has multiple medical records, achieve accountability which means the ability to identify the healthcare party who deal with medical data, overcome the lack of ability to uniquely identify patients, using standardized medical terminology, maintain patient privacy and effectively retrieve patient information.
This research was done to find solutions to the following research questions: What are the benefits of current patient record system in Hamad Medical Corporation? What is the most practical way of using patient healthcare information to help medical researchers? And how can electronic patient record systems improve the quality of retrieving diagnosis data and avoid medical errors while saving time for healthcare professionals?

The research is based on two steps: first step, evaluating the current situation at HMC and second step, enhancements were suggested to current EPR in HMC. Suggested enhancement are adding the Qatari ID to EPR to overcome interoperability and assure data integrity, adding National Drug Code NDC to be able to retrieve medication prescript by physicians and adding diagnosis from one medical thesaurus.
The methods of investigation used was: case study approach, exploring a HMC case and conducting interviews while using established theories to reach conclusions.