Sars and chemical warfare risk bring spotlight on clinical information systems

Overseas experience in using health information technology to deal with the SARS outbreak and fears about the readiness of healthcare systems to deal with communicable diseases, bio-terrorism and chemical warfare have highlighted the public health potential of Clinical Information Systems (CIS), according to participants at the Health Informatics Conference (HIC), convened in Sydney recently.

Richard Craven, Asia Pacific CEO of international healthcare software provider iSOFT, said the South-East Asia experience showcased the real potential and benefits of technology at a time of crisis.

"One of our clinical information system customers SingHealth showed us technology at its best providing information for multiple agencies quickly and efficiently. Health officials were able to provide daily updates, reports, patient contact histories and electronic health records on every new SARS diagnosis," Craven said.

"We overcame an initial obstacle by immediately issuing an Interim licensing agreement for our systems to the Western Health Cluster - at the time only the Eastern Cluster were iSOFT Clinical Manager users - but as soon as the two were linked we were able to make some real progress across the whole country tracking and augmenting the diagnosis of SAR patients."

ISOFT is launching a new electronic health record system at HIC called i.EPR (iSOFT Electronic Patient Record). It is this concept of consolidating information from, and providing applications to all facets of the healthcare system forming a single clinical record that underpins information systems like the one employed in Singapore.

Dr Martin Shen from The ChinaCare Group, believes this is exactly the kind of initiative that will allow medical information systems to break out from their traditional clinical focus and come to play a greater role in issues like diseases surveillance, contact tracing (identifying the individual source of disease outbreaks) and community responses to outbreaks.

"Consider a situation where we are faced with biochemical terrorism. Data contained within a clinical information system, updated in real-time, would play a critical role in providing active decision support to community care providers, public health authorities, the police, military, postal and immigration services," said Dr Shen. According to Dr Shen, relative expenditure on clinical systems in the healthcare sector is dwarfed by investments in other information centric businesses.