Deficient areas of preparedness at the hospital
| Areas of deficiency | Suggestions |
|---|---|
| Sharing of patient health records | (a) Defining what information needs to be shared with whom and in which way |
| (b) With a prospective EHR system, ensuring that a variety of clinicians can not only access patient health information efficiently when required, but also ensuring that the information can be secured with patient privacy protected | |
| Appropriateness of prescriptions | Exploring options to decrease prescription errors such as automatic check of contraindication when electronic patient information is updated and complete |
| Availability of software tools to assist physicians in answering patient questions | Using a reference portal (eg, a clinical information website with a search engine) to create a filtered and customised set of contents |
| Clinicians’ concern about IT reliability and high investment and low reimbursement of the system implementation | (a) Making and executing education and awareness plans prior to the EHR implementation |
| (b) Improving clinicians’ understanding of how the EHR can benefit their performance in a pandemic situation and achieve better patient care outcomes | |
| Clinicians’ dissatisfaction with the software in use | Exploring ways to improve the human–computer interactional design to suit end-users such as involvement of clinical champions at the design phase |
EHR, electronic health records.