In the Guyana Ministry of Health’s end of year press conference, the nation’s Minister of Health announced that a UK company has been awarded a contract to deliver its electronic health records system worth $3.3 million, across its hospitals.
According to the details of submitted bids, the successful supplier has been announced as Riomed Limited, with offices in the UK, Trinidad & Tobago, and India.
“We went out to public tender, and got 14 expressions of interest,” said Dr Frank Anthony, Minister of Health. “Phase one will be going out to the Georgetown Public Hospital and satellite clinics, and once that is successfully completed we will be able to roll it out to the other hospitals. We expect that to start early in 2025.”
According to a statement from the Ministry, the integrated electronic system will contain patient’s medical history, diagnoses, medications, treatments and test results, allowing healthcare professionals to “make informed decisions regarding patient care, facilitate better patient referrals or transfers and improve the efficiency and accuracy of documentation”. To learn more about the awarded contract, please click here.
Wider trend: Electronic health records
For a recent HTN Now panel discussion on the topic of managing EHR complexity, we were joined by Paul Charnley, former CIO and chair of the NHS Blueprinting Programme, and Mike Hardman, principal engineer and EPR technology lead at Aire Logic, who shared some of their insight and experience on overcoming challenges around EHR design and implementation. Paul and Mike discussed challenges around EHR complexity, addressing technical issues, best practices around design and performance, and more.
In a poll, we asked our LinkedIn audience: two years from now, how many GP clinical system (core electronic health record) suppliers do you think there will be: 1-3, 4-5, or 6+? The majority of respondents thought the most likely answer would be “1-3”, with this option attracting 43 percent of votes. Coming in second was “6+” with 34 percent of votes.
In a deep dive earlier in the year, we also explored EHRs in South Africa, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, looking at barriers and facilitators, healthcare professionals’ satisfaction with health information systems, adopting medical records in developing countries, and more.
And the Princess Alexandra Hospital NHS Trust shared the go-live of its electronic health record ‘Alex Health’, offering an integrated digital record of patient care which will draw information from “all health systems that currently store patient information/data”. The trust referred to the go-live as a “major undertaking” with a lot of work involved, but expects “huge benefits for patients” following deployment.
