NHI MediCloud System
People in Taiwan have easy access to convenient medical care. Many people are accustomed to going to different hospitals or seeing different doctors for different symptoms. Therefore, medical histories and medication profiles for each individual are kept in different healthcare facilities. The doctors do not have access to complete data, and hence overlapping prescriptions and laboratory tests or exams easily occur. If there are drug interactions between repeatedly-prescribed drugs, overdoses thus become that much more likely. This affects patients' medication safety.
In order to enhance the quality of medical care and medication for the general public, beginning in July 2013, the National Health Insurance Administration (NHIA) integrated cloud technology to create a patient-centered cloud medical chart system. This was further upgraded in 2016 to become the NHI Cloud-based Inquiry System for Medical Care Information. Data for patients seeking medical care at different healthcare facilities is combined on the same platform. This allows doctors at respective facilities to impose clinical dispositions and issue prescriptions, and as pharmacists are preparing a prescription or providing patients with medication consulting service, they can inquire about the patient's recent medical care and medication records, thus increasing medication safety for the general public.
Items that are currently available for inquiries include 12 types of information: Western medicine, traditional Chinese medicine medication records, records and results from laboratory tests and exams, detailed surgical data, dental dispositions and surgical records, allergy medication records, specific controlled drug administration records, specific coagulation factor administration records, rehabilitative medicine records, discharge summaries, and CDC preventive inoculations. Doctors may also retrieve various medical images from computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) through the cloud system. This helps patients save time and money spent on traveling and retrieving films, too.
To promote inquiries and use by healthcare facilities, the NHIA encourages affiliated medical service institutions to make inquiries and use the system through a benchmark-sharing program. The NHIA also continues to hold workshops and communicate through advertising materials, the media, and its presence in events for general public and healthcare professionals. In addition, the amount of medical information available is gradually being increased, and the computer interface is getting more and more user-friendly. The hope is to enhance the accessibility and use rate of the NHI Cloud-based Inquiry System for Medical Care Information among healthcare professionals. Medical care and medication safety of patients will thus hopefully become more thorough, and repeated prescriptions and waste will be reduced to a minimum, too, thereby realizing more effective utilization of NHI resources.