Implementing a disease-specific Electronic Medical Record System at Bangkok Medical Center: Lessons Learned

Abstract

Diabetic Mellitus (DM) is a lifelong chronic disease that has a major impact on health care costs. Taking care of diabetic patients relies heavily on adequate and accurate informatics.  In order for care providers to view a patient history and to be able to project the trend of future treatments, the health information system must be concise and include a function for easy access to patient  records to efficiently locate all the related data. At the Bangkok Medical Center (BMC), the existing Hospital Information System (HIS) is mainly used to manage administrative functions, such as making appointments, registering patients, order entry, results reporting, and billing. The traditional paper clinical record from  providers are still used and scanned as an image into the HIS.  We found that the HIS is too generalized and broad, and does not meet the specific needs for diabetes management. The display of information is sub-optimal, not only because it’s incomplete and  often contains scanned images of illegibly written notes, but also because it presents a cluttered user interface (UI) that includes  myriad windows with laboratory results, radiology reports and medication lists, making viewing of summarized data quite difficult.