Progress of hospital information system (HIS) in China has made significant progress in recent years. HIS has played a very important role in hospital, and the construction and employment of HIS can improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare work. But the development of HIS in China is unbalanced and there are many problems such as nonstandard hospital management, poor standardization, and lack of consolidation of software development. As a consequence, the current HIS is not able to meet the needs of reform in China's healthcare system. In the future, for the sake of medical information sharing, telemedicine, hospital efficiency enhancement, integration needs to be realized.
In recent years, Hospital Information System (HIS) has been developed in several areas. Many hospitals have constructed HIS. According to the Ministry of Health in 2004, there were 6,063 hospitals out of 15,924 that had established hospital information systems. It is estimated that about 70% of county-level hospitals and above have constructed HIS by mid-2007.
In 2004, the total cost for information technology (IT) in health sector was estimated at approximately RMB 3.5 billions (US$423.5 million), which increased 25% compared with 2003. Most of the resources were committed to HIS. Construction of HIS has taken good effect, which changed the style of hospital management, offered tremendous opportunities to reduce clinical errors (e.g. medication errors, diagnostic errors), to support health care professionals (e.g. availability of timely, up-to-date patient information), to increase the efficiency of care (e.g. less waiting times for patients), or even to improve the quality of patient care. Today, HIS is not only a symbol of modern management, but also one of core competence of a hospital.
Nowadays, with reform in healthcare system and the entry into WTO, HISs is confronting many challenges in China. Medical domain will develop into standardization and internationalization, which stimulate different grade hospitals and many related organizations (e.g. insurance agents, finance organizations, community station), into a big integer. But the forepart HIS didn't consider medical information standards, and can't share medical information.
Read more about this topic: Health Informatics In China
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