Two years ago, medical records at Mount Alvernia Hospital (MAH) were maintained on paper. Care teams in each department manually kept up with and cross-checked paper medical records. This resulted in a laborious work flow. Records of MAH patients who visited other healthcare institutions were maintained separately and were not available unless clinicians requested for them.
MAH brought IHiS on board as part of its efforts to enhance its hospital operations and integrate into the national healthcare network. IHiS’ role was to provide IT consultancy services to facilitate the implementation of the hospital’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system – HealthAngel. To kickstart the implementation, IHiS worked with SingHealth to provide the base solution – Sunrise Clinical Manager (SCM) with a set of basic configuration for MAH to build on their system according to their needs. SingHealth, as one of the pioneer healthcare institutions to have introduced the EMR in Singapore, has also shared its experiences on the Do’s and Don’ts as well as implementation and workflow improvements with MAH.
The SCM allowed MAH to adapt the localised content, workflows and interfaces to its environment. IHiS, which previously helped to establish three EMR systems for our public healthcare clusters, supported MAH in the following areas:
How HealthAngel is Changing Care at MAH
To adopt the massive digitisation effort, MAH trained over 800 staff members on the usage of the new EMR system. This included helping some of the less tech-savvy staff adapt to the new technology. To this end, IHiS also provided guidance to MAH on the training approach and strategy, including giving an analysis of the institution’s goals and strategic objectives, identifying gaps between the knowledge staff are required to acquire and their current competencies as well as developing a structured training curriculum.
The introduction of HealthAngel has improved the way MAH’s care team works across settings to provide patients with a more coordinated, holistic and safer care.
The IHiS team continues to assist MAH in its post-implementation review to distil important learning points for future projects.
In the next phase, MAH will work to incorporate key features such as introducing the electronic version of the Letter of Certification that is used by clinicians for fees charging, providing users with remote system access and enhancing system security with features such as biometric authentication.
Looking further into the horizon, HealthAngel will open possibilities for integration between private health institutions like MAH and national systems such as the National Electronic Health Record.
