BACKGROUND

Primary care for pediatric patients focuses on providing comprehensive, accessible, and coordinated healthcare from the neonatal period to adolescence. The implementation and use of electronic medical records (EMR) in pediatric primary care facilities is an efficient strategy to gather necessary information on the epidemiology of common pediatric diseases in the Philippines.

This study aimed to determine the frequency distribution of pediatric diseases in a rural primary healthcare facility in the Philippines.

This cross-sectional study reviewed the EMR of all pediatric patients who consulted in a primary care facility in Samal, Bataan from April 2019 to March 2021. Data gathered include sex, age in years, chief complaint, diagnosis, and month of consultation. Data was summarized using descriptive statistics.

A total of 14,462 pediatric consults were recorded from April 2019 to March 2021. There were slightly more male patients (52.1%). The mean age of the patients was 6.5 years (standard deviation 5.22). The highest number of consults came from the 1- to 4-year-old age group (41.5%). The most common chief complaints were cough (45.9%), fever (25.5%), and colds (24.9%). The most frequent diagnoses were upper respiratory tract infections (47.4%), followed by lower respiratory tract infections (6.9%), and skin and soft tissue infections (5.3%). Majority of the consults for respiratory tract infections, skin and soft tissue infections, gastroenteritis, asthma, and dermatitis were in the 1- to 4-year-old age group. Urinary tract infections and otitis media or externa were recorded more frequently in the 5- to 9-year-old age group.

Respiratory tract infections, followed by skin and soft tissue infections, were the most frequently identified diseases in children consulting a primary care facility at a rural site in the Philippines. The most common chief complaints, defined as the primary reason for seeking consult, were cough, fever, and colds. Data was gathered through EMR review, which may aid in the planning of programs and policies to improve primary care service delivery.

OBJECTIVES: The objective of the study was to create a roadmap for the adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) in India based an analysis of the strategies of other countries and national scenarios of ICT use in India. METHODS: The strategies for adoption of EHR in other countries were analyzed to find the crucial steps taken. Apart from reports collected from stakeholders in the country, the study relied on the experience of the author in handling several e-health projects. RESULTS: It was found that there are four major areas where the countries considered have made substantial efforts: ICT infrastructure, Policy & regulations, Standards & interoperability, and Research, development & education. A set of crucial activities were identified in each area. Based on the analysis, a roadmap is suggested. It includes the creation of a secure health network; health information exchange; and the use of open-source software, a national health policy, privacy laws, an agency for health IT standards, R&D, human resource development, etc. CONCLUSIONS: Although some steps have been initiated, several new steps need to be taken up for the successful adoption of EHR. It requires a coordinated effort from all the stakeholders.
Education ; Electronic Health Records* ; Health Information Exchange ; Health Policy ; Humans ; India* ; Jurisprudence ; Medical Informatics ; Privacy ; Social Control, Formal

OBJECTIVES: Clinical documents (CDs) have evolved from traditional paper documents containing narrative text information into the electronic record sheets composed of itemized records, where each record is expressed as an item with a specific value. We defined medical record (MR) items to be information entities with a specific value. These entities were then used to compile form-based clinical documents as part of an electronic health record system (EHR-s). METHODS: We took a reusable bottom-up developmental approach for the MR items, which provided three things: efficient incorporation of the local needs and requirements of the medical professionals from various departments in the hospital, comprehensive inclusion of the essential concepts of the basic elements required in clinical documents, and the provision of a structured means for meaningful data entry and retrieval. This paper delineates our experiences in developing and managing medical records at a large tertiary university hospital in Korea. RESULTS: We collected 63,232 MR items from paper records scanned into 962 CDs. The MR item database was constructed using 13,287 MR items after removing redundant items. During the first year of service users requested changes to be made to 235 (1.8%) attributes of the MR items and also requested the additional 9,572 new MR items. In the second year, the attributes of 70 (0.5%) of the existing MR items were changed and 3,704 new items were added. The number of registered MR items increased by 72.0% in the first year and 27.9% in the second year. CONCLUSIONS: The MR item concept provides an easier and more structured means of data entry within an EHR-s. By using these MR items, various kinds of clinical documents can be easily constructed and allows for medical information to be reused and retrieved as data. The success of the use of MR items in a large tertiary university hospital system provides evidence that verifies our approach as being an efficient means of user-oriented and structured data entry, enabling the easy reuse of medical records.
Electronic Health Records ; Electronics ; Electrons ; Medical Records

Electronic Health Records ; Humans ; Medical Records ; Odontodysplasia

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this study was to investigate the clinical decision support (CDS) functions and digitalization of clinical documents of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems in Korea. This exploratory study was conducted focusing on current status of EMR systems. METHODS: This study used a nationwide survey on EMR systems conducted from July 25, 2018 to September 30, 2018 in Korea. The unit of analysis was hospitals. Respondents of the survey were mainly medical recorders or staff members in departments of health insurance claims or information technology. This study analyzed data acquired from 132 hospitals that participated in the survey. RESULTS: This study found that approximately 80% of clinical documents were digitalized in both general and small hospitals. The percentages of general and small hospitals with 100% paperless medical charts were 33.7% and 38.2%, respectively. The EMR systems of general hospitals are more likely to have CDS functions of warnings regarding drug dosage, reminders of clinical schedules, and clinical guidelines compared to those of small hospitals; this difference was statistically significant. For the lists of digitalized clinical documents, almost 93% of EMR systems in general hospitals have the inpatient progress note, operation records, and discharge summary notes digitalized. CONCLUSIONS: EMRs are becoming increasingly important. This study found that the functions and digital documentation of EMR systems still have a large gap, which should be improved and made more sophisticated. We hope that the results of this study will contribute to the development of more sophisticated EMR systems.
Appointments and Schedules ; Decision Support Systems, Clinical ; Electronic Health Records ; Health Information Exchange ; Hope ; Hospitals, General ; Humans ; Inpatients ; Insurance, Health ; Korea ; Medical Informatics ; Medical Records ; Medical Records Systems, Computerized ; Surveys and Questionnaires

OBJECTIVE: Applications to extract medical information from electronic medical records(EMRs) confront some serious obstacles such as spelling errors, ambiguous abbreviations, and unrecognizable words. Those obstacles hinder the process of finding medical entities, relations, and events. We present an efficient EMR refinement system for the purpose of medical information extraction from EMRs, not just for traditional text error correction. METHODS: The EMR refinement system has been designed and implemented through following steps: 1) Build domain constrained dictionary database, 2) Correct spelling errors in Korean-English EMR documents, 3) Resolve ambiguous abbreviations in the bilingual documents. The resulting EMR documents are now machine readable and can be applied to various applications including information extraction. RESULT: Precision rate of the refinement system for spelling error correction is 80.4% and for disambiguating abbreviations/acronyms is 94.7%. CONCLUSION: We developed an EMR refinement system to correct spelling errors and resolve ambiguous abbreviations as well as unrecognizable words. Our system can enhance the reliability of medical records and contribute to develop further application systems in the field of text mining and information extraction.
Data Mining ; Electronic Health Records ; Electronics ; Electrons ; Medical Records

Using elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) and SHA-1 message digest algorithms to get the Electronic Health Record (EHR)'s digital finger print, then sending the digital finger print to another unattached organization through the internet, no information about the finger print will be stored on the local server. The system is designed to be a middleware and you can check out whether the EHR has been modified or not by using the finger print generated by the middleware, so as to ensure the EHR's originality and authenticity effectively.
Algorithms ; Electronic Health Records ; Medical Records Systems, Computerized ; Systems Integration

With the electronic medical records information system as the core of hospital information platform design, this paper introduces the design of the system which is structured for electronic medical records, and the advantage and effectiveness is also introduced. From the aspects of the concept, system framework, data integration, right frame and safety control, identity index and a clinical pathway, etc, the paper introduces the basic idea and process of the hospital information platform design, with the hospital recording electronic medical records as the core.
Electronic Health Records ; Hospital Information Systems ; Medical Records Systems, Computerized

OBJECTIVES: Open-source Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems have gained importance. The main aim of our research is to guide organizational choice by comparing the features, functionality, and user-facing system performance of the five most popular open-source EHR systems. METHODS: We performed qualitative content analysis with a directed approach on recently published literature (2012–2017) to develop an integrated set of criteria to compare the EHR systems. The functional criteria are an integration of the literature, meaningful use criteria, and the Institute of Medicine's functional requirements of EHR, whereas the user-facing system performance is based on the time required to perform basic tasks within the EHR system. RESULTS: Based on the Alexa web ranking and Google Trends, the five most popular EHR systems at the time of our study were OSHERA VistA, GNU Health, the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS), Open Electronic Medical Record (OpenEMR), and OpenEHR. We also found the trends in popularity of the EHR systems and the locations where they were more popular than others. OpenEMR met all the 32 functional criteria, OSHERA VistA met 28, OpenMRS met 12 fully and 11 partially, OpenEHR-based EHR met 10 fully and 3 partially, and GNU Health met the least with only 10 criteria fully and 2 partially. CONCLUSIONS: Based on our functional criteria, OpenEMR is the most promising EHR system, closely followed by VistA. With regards to user-facing system performance, OpenMRS has superior performance in comparison to OpenEMR.
Electronic Health Records ; Electronic Prescribing ; Meaningful Use ; Medical Order Entry Systems ; Medical Records

BACKGROUND

Evaluation of primary care allows for identification of problems in the healthcare system, such as poor health outcomes, inappropriate health services, overuse of unnecessary resources, or underuse of recommended strategies. Assessment of adherence to existing clinical practice guidelines as quality indicators is critical for evaluating the effectiveness of primary care and shaping healthcare policies.

To determine the adherence of primary care providers to existing practice guidelines for common pediatric concerns in remote, rural, and urban areas in the Philippines.

This cross-sectional study included data from the electronic medical records (EMR) of patients aged 19 years and below who consulted at the three pilot sites of the Philippine Primary Care Studies (PPCS) from January to December 2019. Relevant demographic data and quality indicator measures (e.g., immunization history, adolescent smoking history, medication and supplement prescription) were extracted from the EMR by the PPCS data management team. Adherence to existing guidelines on pediatric history taking and management of common illnesses (e.g., diarrhea, upper respiratory tract infections, malnutrition) was evaluated.

This study included 8,724 pediatric patients seen across the three pilot sites from January to December 2019. Immunization history was taken in only 0.4% of pediatric patients. Smoking history was taken in only 6.8% of adolescent patients. Zinc was prescribed in only 40.1% of patients with diarrhea. No infants were prescribed with vitamin A, while iron was prescribed in only 2.5% of children and 3% of adolescent females. In contrast to the recommendations of existing guidelines, antibiotics were prescribed in 38.5% of patients with AGE and 62.5% of patients with viral URTI. Montelukast was prescribed as first-line asthma treatment in 4.7% of cases. Multivitamins were prescribed in 57.2% of all pediatric patients.

Overuse of inappropriate medications and underuse of appropriate interventions were observed in this study. There was low adherence to evaluation of pediatric immunization history, adolescent smoking history, zinc supplementation for diarrhea, and iron and vitamin A supplementation among identified vulnerable population groups. Over prescription of the following were observed: (1) antibiotics for acute gastroenteritis and probable viral URTI, (2) multivitamins for the general pediatric population, and (3) montelukast among newly diagnosed asthma patients.