The administration is proposing legal changes to make it mandatory for all healthcare workers to upload “important patient information” onto its eHealth platform.
Under the proposal, Deputy Secretary for Health Sam Hui said, patients would still get to decide whether to use the system at all, as well as whether they consent to healthcare providers’ accessing their records.
“We hope patients understand that a complete medical record is very important to the standard and level of safety, with regards to the healthcare services they receive,” he said on an RTHK programme.
“The public shouldn’t have too much of a choice when it comes to what information they put or not put into the eHealth account.”
Hui said if patients do have concerns about joining the electronic system, they can bring them up with healthcare professionals.
He stressed that the government respects the personal nature of patients’ medical records.
The medical sector, he said, agrees that records such as drug allergies, jabs received and past diagnoses are very important to reach up-to-date diagnoses.
He said officials are working on getting an outsourced provider to sync electronic record platforms that better connect the eHealth system with others.
Speaking on the same programme, family doctor Lam Wing-wo said he agrees that the trend is to have big data, which can help with the public health situation.
The government has said 60 percent of private doctors currently access records stored on eHealth but that basically all information in the system is provided by the public sector.
Lam said that from what he understands, it’s not very accurate for the administration to say that private doctors aren’t being proactive enough to upload records.
Doctors, he pointed out, cannot simply submit data to eHealth because the electronic medical record systems used by the public and private sectors are different.
The bill to amend the Electronic Health Record Sharing System Ordinance will be tabled to the legislature for first reading on Wednesday.
