Omar Shboul, Chief Technology Officer, for Electronic Health Solutions (EHS) www.ehs.com speaking at the 2015 Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance (OSEHRA) http://summit.osehra.org Summit, presented an in-depth picture of how the VistA system is successfully serving the residents of Jordan.
Jordan’s health system had been under pressure since the country was late to develop clinical and financial electronic systems. As a result, the health system was under pressure and providing poorly integrated medical services. The medical professionals in the country wanted to establish an open source electronic system to better serve the population that would suit Jordan’s needs.
The national ehealth program in Jordan called “Hakeem” encompasses the whole public sector health system. The key stakeholders in Hakeem are the Ministry of Health and the Royal Medical Services which manages healthcare services in the country.
Jordan’s goal was to share a single, comprehensive, national electronic healthcare delivery network that would provide immediate and complete access to healthcare information on any patient to all clinicians at the point-of-care and at all healthcare sites within the country. VistA was considered the answer to the problem for providing care to the people in the country.
The initiative to find solutions to establishing e-health began in 2009. During the first year, a national gold version of VistA was developed which was tested as a proof of concept. Within 18 months, sufficient knowledge transfer and capacity building had been completed and the Jordan version of VistA was initiated.
The pilot phase from 2009 to 2011 was tested in hospitals and clinics. By 2018, the hope is to implement VistA in 42 hospitals, 85 comprehensive clinics in 2015, and as time goes on, to establish VistA in more than 300 primary clinics.
VistA includes a patient administration system, complete health records, pathology and radiology systems, and provides for electronic prescribing. The goal is to put the whole nation on a centralized database so by 2018, the database will include ten million patients and their information. This will help to support decision-making and will assist in developing effective healthcare policies.
EHS is currently working on adding new systems within the Hakeem program such as a billing system which is in the trial phase at Prince Hamzah Hospital and expected to go live in 2015. Hakeem is currently developing a mobile application so that patients can book appointments online and receive notifications and alerts from doctors if they are facing medical issues.
So far, the Hakeem system is making better use of resources, reduced costs by 51 percent, controlling waste and duplication, has reduced drug costs by 24 percent, and provided an increase of 56 percent in laboratory efficiency. Today, Jordan has the largest deployment of VistA outside of the Veterans Administration and is helping to transform the healthcare system now serving 8 million people
EHS is also supporting medical researchers through the Jordan Electronic Medical Library (ELM) www.elm.jo which is a free electronic website enabling subscribers to have access to all up-to-date research in the health and medical fields.
In addition, the Hakeem Academy is working with universities and making courses available on how to establish electronic health records and how to use the VistA system effectively. The educational program is also building computerized laboratories so that doctors and nurses can work on VistA before they graduate and go out into the healthcare and medical fields.