1st day sessions
The main attraction of the conference started with the Welcome Keynote session from Dr Maymona. She read the speech of Dr. Haji Mohd. Ismail Bin Merican, Director General of Health. She mainly talked about the progress of IT in health sector of Malaysia. Malaysia already developed HIS, Decrease Burden, Delivery System, Human Resource for Health etc. They are trying to implement the Health Lifetime Record where the public and private sectors are working together. She also talked about the challenges they have - Cost, People, Vendors, Technology, Stakeholders and Legal factors.
The first day Keynote session which is the Opening Keynote session, addressed by Mr. William Edward Hammond. In his presentation, he tried to open up his vision and thought and experience towards computerizing the health sector which is called Electronic Health Record (EHR). He discussed the flexibility, accessibility and re-usability of data, data should be fully informative because more data doesn’t mean more information. He talked about the globalization of information.
The first individual session that I attended is the Qualifying the Impact of Electronic Health Record System in Hospital, presented by Johanna Westbrook, Director, HIRE Unit, the University of Sydney. She mainly showed their research result and experience in automating the hospitals.
Next session I attended at 14:30 PM. A comprehensive and integrated EMR system- example from Japan by Dr John Wocher. He mainly presented that his hospital is fully automated and paperless. But before implementing the paperless process, they run paper and IT parallel for three years. They developed an in-house product.
The last session I attended at 15:45 PM. The topic was Moving Beyond IT System in Healthcare. Dr Paul Whatling form UK presented the benefits of automation system of Healthcare.
2nd day sessions
We did late for 15 minutes. The sessions I attended had no rich contents.
The first session I attended on Towards Singapore’s National Electronic Health Record – The Fundamentals. They talked about their approach vision of an electronic health record by 2010. 3 speakers presented in different ways. But my attraction was in Architecture and Standards, unfortunately the speaker didn’t have enough time to speak details on this topic.
Second session was little bit case study on applying web2.0 collaboration technologies in health sector. I thought I would get some information which can help us to enrich our application.
Next session was bit interesting and from my point of view it is the best session I attended in. “How is Malaysia Managing the Interoperability Challenges?” Speaker was Mr. Azrin Hohd Zubir, Health Informatics Consultant, Meridian Project Management, Malaysia. The mainly talked about their TeleHealth blueprint, Health IT framework.
After that session we attended in the day2 keynote session presented by Prof. Enrico Coiera from Australia. He tried to give some ideas about the importance of communication in clinical organizations. He also talked about multitasking stress, interruption in task which can be disturbing. IT increases of tasks. The clinicians have to communicate with patients, nurses and again they also have to use the IT. And if IT can’t communicate properly, these multitasking and interrupting can be the demerits of HIS. Most of the time clinicians don’t like these multitask and interruption which make them uninterested in HIS. They like the usual paper based system. That’s why health sector still running in the back side of IT. So clinicians need training so that they can synchronize their works, need such a system which can buildup interactive communications and less interruption, overall an efficient system. And that can bring a successful HIS.
HIMSS gave us a facility of e-sessions. I took this opportunity and choose the session of “Oral Health Services in a e Paperless (IT-based) Clinic”. Malaysia already implemented IT-based Dental Clinic (Clinical Information System,). This speaker presented the features and work flow of this system.
The last session of the day that I attended in is an introduction of HL7 V2.5. The speaker Dr Yun Sik Kwak from Korea mainly introduced the messaging standard of HL7 2.5 which can be the best information bridge and can build an effective EHR.
3rd day sessions
The first session of the day isn’t that much mentionable. The speaker mainly told that the transactions of information need to be kept in a well format so that the information can be found on demand for audit.
What a Closing Session!!
I attended in the best presentation in my life. It was unique, interactive, informative and dynamic. He mainly focused on communication, collaboration and teamwork. He gave different type of interesting examples.
In an example, he proved that people doesn’t read the whole sentence. They guess the sentence from the image that have in their mind.
In another example he wanted to say that everything shouldn’t be performed using IT. Sometime we need observation. So fully automated system cannot be a good idea, especially in health sector.
Why health sector is not automated yet? Because lack of communication, understanding and the most important cause is we are trying to build a fully automated system which is not possible.
So what we need? We need to build up communication, collaboration and teamwork between IT and clinicians. And in this way we will able to build a good HIS.
