Regional differences in electronic medical record adoption in Japan: A nationwide longitudinal ecological study

Investigation and Countermeasures Research of Hospital Information Construction of Tertiary Class-A Public Hospitals in China: Questionnaire Study

BACKGROUND

Medical informatization has initially demonstrated its advantages in improving the medical service industry. Over the past decade, the Chinese government have made a lot of effort to complete infrastructural information construction in the medical and health domain, and smart hospitals will be the next priority according to policies released by Chinese government in recent years.

OBJECTIVE

To provide strategic support for further development of medical information construction in China, this study aimed to investigate the current situation of medical information construction in tertiary class-A public hospitals and analyze the existing problems and countermeasures.

METHODS

This study surveyed 23 tertiary class-A public hospitals in China who voluntarily responded to a self-designed questionnaire distributed in April 2020 to investigate the current medical information construction status. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the current configurations of hospital information department, hospital information systems, hospital internet service and its application, and the satisfaction of hospital information construction. Interviews were also conducted with the respondents in this study for requirement analysis.

RESULTS

The results show that hospital information construction has become one of the priorities of the hospitals' daily work, and the medical information infrastructural construction and internet service application of the hospitals are good; however, a remarkable gap among the different level of hospitals can be observed. Although most hospitals had built their own IT team to undertake information construction work, the actual utilization rate of big data collected and stored in the hospital information system was not satisfactory.

CONCLUSIONS

Support for the construction of information technology in primary care institutions should be increased to balance the level of development of medical informatization in medical institutions at all levels. The training of complex talents with both IT and medical backgrounds should be emphasized, and specialized disease information standards should be developed to lay a solid data foundation for data utilization and improve the utilization of medical big data.

Analysis of the Effects of Electronic Medical Records and a Payment Scheme on the Length of Hospital Stay

Objectives: This study analyzed the effects of computerization of medical information systems and a hospital payment scheme on medical care outcomes. Specifically, we examined the effects of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and a diagnosis procedure combination/per-diem payment scheme (DPC/PDPS) on the average length of hospital stay (ALOS).Methods: Post-intervention changes in the monthly ALOS were measured using an interrupted time-series analysis.Results: The level changes observed in the monthly ALOS immediately post-DPC/PDPS were –1.942 (95% confidence interval [CI], –2.856 to –1.028), –1.885 (95% CI, –3.176 to –0.593), –1.581 (95% CI, –3.081 to –0.082) and –2.461 (95% CI, –3.817 to 1.105) days in all ages, <50, 50–64, and ≥65 years, respectively. During the post-DPC/PDPS period, trends of 0.107 (95% CI, 0.069 to 0.144), 0.048 (95% CI, –0.006 to 0.101), 0.183 (95% CI, 0.122 to 0.245) and 0.110 (95% CI, 0.054 to 0.167) days/month, respectively, were observed. During the post-EMR period, trends of –0.053 (95% CI, –0.080 to –0.027), –0.093 (95% CI, –0.135 to –0.052), and –0.049 (95% CI, –0.087 to –0.012) days/month were seen for all ages, 50–64 and ≥65 years, respectively.Conclusions: The increasing post-DPC/PDPS trends offset the decline in ALOS observed immediately post-DPC/PDPS, and the observed ALOS was longer than the counterfactual at the end of the DPC/PDPS study periods. Conversely, due to the downward trend seen after EMR introduction, the actual ALOS at the end of the EMR study period was shorter than the counterfactual, suggesting that EMRs might be more effective than the DPC/PDPS in sustainably reducing the LOS.

Digital interventions to improve safety and quality of inpatient diabetes management: A systematic review

IMPORTANCE

Diabetes is common amongst hospitalised patients and contributes to increased length of stay and poorer outcomes. Digital transformation, particularly the implementation of electronic medical records (EMRs), is rapidly occurring across the healthcare sector and provides an opportunity to improve the safety and quality of inpatient diabetes care. Alongside this revolution has been a considerable and ongoing evolution of digital interventions to optimise care of inpatients with diabetes including optimisation of EMRs, digital clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and solutions utilising data visibility to allow targeted patient review.

OBJECTIVE

To systematically appraise the recent literature to determine which digitally-enabled interventions including EMR, CDSS and data visibility solutions improve the safety and quality of non-critical care inpatient diabetes management.

METHODS

Pubmed, Embase and Cochrane databases were searched for suitable articles. Selected articles underwent quality assessment and analysis with results grouped by intervention type.

RESULTS

1202 articles were identified with 42 meeting inclusion criteria. Four key interventions were identified; computerised physician order entry (n = 4), clinician decision support systems (n = 21), EMR driven active case finding (data visibility solutions) and targeted patient review (n = 10) and multicomponent system interventions (n = 7). Studies reported on glucometric outcomes, evidence-based medication ordering including medication errors, and patient and user outcomes. An improvement in glucometric measures particularly mean blood glucose and proportion of target range blood glucose levels and rates of evidence-based insulin prescribing were consistently demonstrated.

CONCLUSION

Digitally-enabled interventions utilised to improve quality and safety of inpatient diabetes care were heterogenous in design. The majority of studies across all intervention types reported positive effects for evidence-based prescribing and glucometric outcomes. There was less evidence for digital interventions reducing diabetes medication administration errors or impacting patient outcomes (length of stay).

Developing and Sustaining an Open Source Electronic Health Record: Evidence from a Field Study in Japan

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are at the heart of reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and quality of healthcare services provided to citizens. Although there is still some skepticism, open source (OS) EHR is a growing phenomenon in health informatics. Given the widespread adoption of OS software (OSS) in several domains, including operating systems, and enterprise systems, the repeated shortfalls faced by healthcare organizations with dominant proprietary EHRs create an opportunity for other alternatives, such as OSS to demonstrate their abilities in addressing these well-documented problems, including inflexibility, high costs, and low interoperability. However, scholars have expressed extensive concerns about the sustainability of OS EHR. Recognizing that OSS project sustainability relies on their governance arrangements, this case study reports on the evolution of the governance and sustainability of a Japanese OS EHR project and provides rich insights to other open source EHR initiative stakeholders, including physicians, developers, researchers, and policy-makers.

The dawning of the digital era in the management of hypertension

Awareness, treatment, and control of hypertension are of the utmost importance in conquering stroke and cardiovascular disease. To reduce the global burden of hypertension, the Japanese Society of Hypertension (JSH) established the "JSH Future Plan" based on an increasing need to transform the strategy for combating hypertension. In addition to energizing conventional approaches in basic, translational, and clinical research, the application of rapidly evolving digital health technologies and artificial intelligence to hypertension healthcare and research (digital hypertension) holds promise for providing further insights into the pathophysiology and therapeutic targets and implementing predictive, personalized, and preemptive approaches in clinical practice. With great potential to revolutionize the landscape of hypertension, digital hypertension has some technical, legal, ethical, social, and financial issues to overcome. Given the multidisciplinary framework, digital hypertension requires comprehensive and strategic collaboration among industry, academia, and government to move forward toward the goal of "Future Medicine".

The efficiency analysis and spatial implications of health information technology: A regional exploratory study in China

The new adoption of healthcare information technology is costly, and effects on healthcare performance can be questionable. This nationwide study in China investigated the efficient performance of healthcare information technology and examined its spatial correlation. Panel data were extracted from the Annual Investigation Report on Hospital Information in China and the China Health Statistics Yearbook for 2007 through 2015 (279 observations). Stochastic frontier analysis was employed to estimate the technical efficiency of healthcare information technology performance and related factors at the regional level. Healthcare information technology performance was positively associated with electronic medical records, total input, and cost of inpatient stay, while picture archiving and communication systems and net assets were negatively related. Local Indicators of Spatial Association showed that there existed significant spatial autocorrelation. Governmental policies would best make distinctions among different forms of healthcare information technology, especially between electronic medical records and picture archiving and communication systems. Policies should be formulated to improve healthcare information technology adoption and reduce regional differences.

Facility and Regional Factors Associated With the New Adoption of Electronic Medical Records in Japan: Nationwide Longitudinal Observational Study

Background

The rate of adoption of electronic medical record (EMR) systems has increased internationally, and new EMR adoption is currently a major topic in Japan. However, no study has performed a detailed analysis of longitudinal data to evaluate the changes in the EMR adoption status over time.

Objective

This study aimed to evaluate the changes in the EMR adoption status over time in hospitals and clinics in Japan and to examine the facility and regional factors associated with these changes.

Methods

Secondary longitudinal data were created by matching data in fiscal year (FY) 2011 and FY 2014 using reference numbers. EMR adoption status was defined as “EMR adoption,” “specified adoption schedule,” or “no adoption schedule.” Data were obtained for hospitals (n=4410) and clinics (n=67,329) that had no adoption schedule in FY 2011 and for hospitals (n=1068) and clinics (n=3132) with a specified adoption schedule in FY 2011. The EMR adoption statuses of medical institutions in FY 2014 were also examined. A multinomial logistic model was used to investigate the associations between EMR adoption status in FY 2014 and facility and regional factors in FY 2011. Considering the regional variations of these models, multilevel analyses with second levels were conducted. These models were constructed separately for hospitals and clinics, resulting in four multinomial logistic models. The odds ratio (OR) and 95% Bayesian credible interval (CI) were estimated for each variable.

Results

A total of 6.9% of hospitals and 14.82% of clinics with no EMR adoption schedules in FY 2011 had adopted EMR by FY 2014, while 10.49% of hospitals and 33.65% of clinics with specified adoption schedules in FY 2011 had cancelled the scheduled adoption by FY 2014. For hospitals with no adoption schedules in FY 2011, EMR adoption/scheduled adoption was associated with practice size characteristics, such as number of outpatients (from quantile 4 to quantile 1: OR 1.67, 95% CI 1.005-2.84 and OR 2.40, 95% CI 1.80-3.21, respectively), and number of doctors (from quantile 4 to quantile 1: OR 4.20, 95% CI 2.39-7.31 and OR 2.02, 95% CI 1.52-2.64, respectively). For clinics with specified EMR adoption schedules in FY 2011, the factors negatively associated with EMR adoption/cancellation of scheduled EMR adoption were the presence of beds (quantile 4 to quantile 1: OR 0.57, 95% CI 0.45-0.72 and OR 0.74, 95% CI 0.58-0.96, respectively) and having a private establisher (quantile 4 to quantile 1: OR 0.27, 95% CI 0.13-0.55 and OR 0.43, 95% CI 0.19-0.91, respectively). No regional factors were significantly associated with the EMR adoption status of hospitals with no EMR adoption schedules; population density was positively associated with EMR adoption in clinics with no EMR adoption schedule (quantile 4 to quantile 1: OR 1.49, 95% CI 1.32-1.69).

Conclusions

Different approaches are needed to promote new adoption of EMR systems in hospitals as compared to clinics. It is important to induce decision making in small- and medium-sized hospitals, and regional postdecision technical support is important to avoid cancellation of scheduled EMR adoption in clinics.