Korea University Anam Hospital has been recognised for its progress toward a digital health ecosystem, with a HIMSS Digital Health Indicator score that places it among the top health systems globally.
WHAT IT’S ABOUT
KU Anam Hospital’s 308/400 DHI score puts its digital health system capacity well above the 153/400 average for health systems in Asia-Pacific, and a North American average of 229/400.
In 2021, the hospital implemented a cloud-based hospital information system, P-HIS, developed jointly by six leading hospitals in Korea and eight technology companies, including Samsung SDS.
P-HIS has 38 modules, such as Emergency, Outpatient, Nursing, Patient Management, and aims to unify medical terminology, provide international standardisation of clinical terminologies, simplify data post-processing and enhance security through the cloud.
The system has so far achieved a decrease of about 60% in the time needed for prescription input by checking errors in real-time to review, correct, and/or remove any associated mistakes; a 60% decrease in operational labor cost; a 40% saving in inoperational technology costs via a charge per use method; and a decrease of 60% in infrastructure build cost.
WHY IT MATTERS
Through the DHI project, KU Anam Hospital was able to identify key priorities for digital action in the short term, as well as the future investment activities required to further improve its digital health capabilities.
As part of KU Medicine, KU Anam is fully devoted to improving its medical service quality by introducing state of the art equipment and systems, according to Andrew Pearce, Vice President Analytics & Global Advisory Lead, HIMSS.
“What is unique about the approach taken is the collaboration being undertaken by leading hospitals and technology companies in Korea to develop the P-HIS,” Pearce said.
“We understand that almost 100 Alliance Hospitals in Korea are being onboarded to use the system. This will mean that the P-HIS benefits achieved to date by KU Anam such as reduced operational and infrastructure costs, improved security and improved data quality will be extended across the Korean health system, improving the health outcomes of more Koreans.”
KU Medicine, founded in 1928, is one of the leading medical providers in Korea with over 9060 staff and students and three hospitals – KU Anam, Guro, and Ansan – providing 2932 beds serving more than 2.9 million patients.
Interoperability was determined to be a strength of KU Anam Hospital’s P-HIS system, which is integrated with 102 other systems, including mobile patient health records, medication management and kiosks via industry standard protocols such as HL7 and SNOMED-CT and common codification of data. The MyHealthway open API platform allows the integration of AI-based precision medical solutions, Doctor Answer and wearable technologies.
The P-HIS has been expanded to KU Guro and Ansan hospitals with the sharing of clinical data designed to support greater collaboration between hospitals and researchers to develop artificial intelligence models that will further person-enabled health, predictive analytics and new medicines.
THE LARGER CONTEXT
The DHI measures progress toward a digital health ecosystem. An ideal digital ecosystem connects clinicians and provider teams with people at point of care, enabling them to manage their health and wellness using digital tools in a secure and private environment.
Other Asia-Pacific organisations that have partnered with HIMSS for the DHI assessment include Indonesia’s PERSI and Australia’s Queensland Health.
ON THE RECORD
“There had been concerns about changing to a cloud-based system as there were no previous examples of an entire HIS being placed in the cloud and many in the organisation thought the conversion was impossible, especially for a large-scale tertiary hospital,” Dr Sangheon Lee, leader of the Biomedical Information Center at KU Anam Hospital, said.
“However, the system has been successfully operating in KU Anam hospital since March 2021. The high DHI score has validated the team’s vision and efforts, providing greater confidence in the direction the organisation is heading towards.”
