The Hospital Authority has made significant progress over the years in digitizing the processes and ways in which care is delivered to patients and the community. For more than 30 years, it has invested in developing its clinical management system, which is now considered one of the most advanced in the world. Recently, it also started working on projects that contribute to its vision of a smart hospital.
However, its digital transformation journey is far from over.
In her case study presentation titled, “Towards Sustainable Healthcare with Digital Health in Hong Kong”, Dr Joanna Pang, Director of Health Informatics at the Hong Kong Hospital Authority, shares how they will continue to digitize later upon the release of the HA 2022-2027 Strategic Plan late last year, it provided an outline of the organization-wide directions for the next five years and included strategic goals for the delivery of care through bright.
Under the plan, Dr. Pang said, they will adopt a new service model and new technologies to improve patient outcomes.
“We will continue to evolve the smart hospital concept by applying AI, digital technology and other cutting-edge technologies that can enable smart care and nurture a smart workforce. .. We hope that we can move towards sustainable healthcare,” she added.
To become a “Digital HA”, the organization seeks to become more decentralized so that it can interact more with the community and empower more patients. Dr Pang also hopes that by going digital, they will be able to reduce outpatient traffic and allow patients to be more proactive in managing their own healthcare and maintaining their outcomes. connected to its care services.
Assess strengths and weaknesses
“There’s a lot of things that we want to deliver and things that we want to do. We have to identify all of those important digital actions in the short term and also have to find ways to prioritize investments for them. certain activities in the future,” said Dr. Pang.
In 2020, HA joined HIMSS to be assessed on the progress of building a digital health ecosystem. It became one of the first organizations to be assessed under the Digital Health Index (DHI) model, which helps HA identify its strengths and weaknesses. It scored 358/400 on the DHI assessment, a remarkably high mark. It scores well in three areas namely governance and workforce, interoperability, and predictive analytics.
“Reviews have helped us mobilize our data across multiple sources and share them in a very secure environment. It also shows what our care providers and care team are delivering. digital support services and we have established a good foundation, which can bring Dr. Pang to share.
Following the DHI review, HA worked towards having all 43 of its hospitals validated for EMRAM Phase 6.
Collective work on AI implementation
“The hard task isn’t in some AI solutions; it’s in how you operate them,” Dr. Pang stated. “It can’t be simply plug and play. You need to interact a lot with your doctors, and you need to identify your pain points and the key issues you want to address, rather than simply addressing them. move to something called AI. You need to identify the problem or problem and see where AI can be helpful.”
From here, working alone won’t cut it, she insisted. “We should work with others.”
HA has established an internal community working on a number of AI initiatives. It is also working with local and international communities to exchange ideas and ways of working on AI projects for healthcare.
Currently, HA has deployed three AI projects across its hospitals, one of which is an imaging solution that helps doctors prioritize chest X-ray reports. The same AI model was then developed to assist clinicians in detecting abnormal findings in chest X-rays. To date, it has analyzed 740,000 cases, reducing the need for a doctor to take notes or read a second time. The third AI solution reads Hepatitis B reports to identify and alert positive cases. After a year of testing, the tool was able to prevent the development of liver failure in 21 patients.
