The government wants to use the Mater Dei hospital’s paperless office system as a blueprint for the way forward in all Malta’s administration systems said IT and Investment Minister Austin Gatt yesterday.
Dr Gatt was speaking during a press conference to announce that the hospital’s new Radiology Information system had been deployed on time by ACS, the company that won the public tender for the IT system.
The new radiology system will spell the death of the old X-Ray film procedure, with images being produced in real time on a computer screen rather than having to go through the tedious process of taking the X-Ray and waiting for it to develop, eventually taking it to the doctor who will provide diagnosis and treatment.
Dr Gatt also took the press on a walkthrough of the hospital’s massive data server room. “We are now one of the very few countries in the European Union that has two actual functioning data centres that mirror each other. This means that if one were to go offline, we would have another that would still be functional, meaning no server downtime whatsoever,” said Dr Gatt.
He said that ACS managed to stick to tight deadlines and launched two systems yesterday on delivery date – the Radiology Information System and the Picture System to accompany it. The third system – to run the hospital’s laboratories – is scheduled for launch next month. He said that the system will now be taken one step further, being linked to all polyclinics around Malta and Gozo. This, he said, will be the stepping-stone to having all Maltese and Gozitan health records on line – thus doing away with paper files.
“This will mean that the medical records of each and every one of us will be accessible from any health centre in Malta or Gozo,” he said. But the government does not want to stop there.
“We want to go further and have these records made available to general practitioners in their own offices. Not only that, but these records will be able to be updated by doctors in hospitals, health centres and more,” he said.
In fact, Health Minister Louis Deguara interjected and said that Malta wanted to introduce a sort of a smart card which patients can keep. This Health Card would store their medical records and be able to be retrieved by doctors anywhere in the world. “In fact, a fair number of EU countries have already expressed an interest in seeing how things work at Mater Dei Hospital,” he said.
Dr Deguara added that the new systems would benefit both staff and patients as it would result in better man-hour utilisation and overall efficiency. He reminded the press that with things as they were, it took two days for a person’s medical file to be retrieved from the archives. “As we can now see, we are outsourcing everything that does not have a direct link to medical care and that is so we can fully concentrate our efforts on diagnosis and treatment,” he said.
Dr Gatt remarked that Malta needed to get out of the data silo mentality and start sharing information. “We need all the staff to embrace the computerised system. It will make their lives easier and I am sure that we will slowly see a change in mentality that will build up momentum and result in a truly efficient system,” he said.