The Ministry of Health and Welfare yesterday announced that it would launch an online medical information platform, saying that its short-term goal is facilitating the sharing of healthcare data between medical centers, so that patients would not need to request copies of their files.
The Department of Information Management said one of the greatest challenges of smart healthcare development in Taiwan is the fragmentation of healthcare data, as hospitals have developed their own electronic medical record systems.
Although Taiwan has an advanced healthcare system and a strong information industry, healthcare information cannot be shared between hospitals due to the lack of a standardized data format, Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Lue Jen-der (呂建德) said.
Photo: Lin Hui-chin, Taipei Times
The launch of Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a standardized electronic healthcare data storage system, would allow smooth exchanges of data between hospitals, Lue said.
Department of Information Management Director Lee Chien-chang (李建璋) said the three core focuses of the new platform are: “data unification,” “rules unification” and “application unification.”
The first goal of data unification is to have a nationwide unified format for electronic medical records, Lee said.
Different countries have different FHIR implementation standards, he said, adding that there are 23 countries that have established their FHIR implementation guidelines.
The ministry hopes to initially allow at least the 109 most common items in medical records, such as gender, age, height, and chronic conditions and medications, to be exchanged between 23 medical centers in the next two years.
The ministry would introduce a clinical quality language (CQL), a standardized and domain-specific programming language, as well as a rule library to achieve rule unification, he said.
Through the CQL, hospitals would be able to automatically check if their diagnoses and prescriptions meet the required standards, which would improve service efficiency, he said.
The ministry would also set up an artificial intelligence (AI) medical application ecosystem similar to Apple and Google’s app stores to achieve application unification, so that hospitals can freely download and apply AI technology to improve their clinical decisionmaking efficiency, he added.
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