Capiz Province Embraces Hospital Informatics, Rolls out Electronic Medical Records

October 8, 2010 8:28 am | by Nimrod Firaza, MD | Posted in News

Mambusao, Capiz – Governor Victor Tanco and PHO Sam Delfin graced the formal turn-over of computers from UP Manila National Telehealth Center to Mambusao General Hospital and Bailan District Hospital last October 7, 2010.

The turn-over was part of the Cost-benefit Analysis of Hospital Computerization project of the PanAsia Networking and Coolaboration on eHealth Applications (PANACeA) funded by the International Development Research Centre of Canada. The CBA aimed to quantify the value of automating patient registration vis-a-vis the costs that accompany it. It employed the free and open source  OpenMRS as the software behind the system.

Governor Tanco committed to hire a province-wide health informatics coordinator and to implement OpenMRS in all of the other three district hospitals. He also agreed to provide Internet to both hospitals as a preparation for the connection of OpenMRS to Philhealth.

“CBA is actually a  three-country project the others being Afghanistan and Pakistan. Although we are still calculating the actual cost-benefit ratio, we already know that it only takes 125,000 pesos to automate hospital patient registration. This price includes all computers and software (which was free) and the contractors to encode the patient index cards in each hospital. If the system connects to Philhealth for eligibility checking, the benefits will surely outweigh this price,” said Dr Alvin Marcelo, project proponent for the Philippines.

OpenMRS is an Open-source Electronic Health Records system developed in 2004 by a collaboration headed by Regenstrief and Partners in Health as a response to emerging trends in infectious diseases such as HIV and Tuberculosis. As such, it was designed to be used in resource constrained environments and could be customized even without programming knowledge. At the core of this system is a “Concept Dictionary” which allows collaboration of data even through different customizations as well as efficient memory use. A customized prototype now being tested at PGH allows it to connect to Philhealth to check for eligibility of patients.

OpenMRS, as an Electronic Medical Records System, it has the capacity to reduce clerical errors, decrease the consumption of materials used in a paper-based information system and increase the speed of queries for information. Being Open-Source, the cost for hospital computerization is significantly reduced.