For our latest international news in brief, we take a closer look at some of the stories to have caught our eye over the last few weeks from across the globe.
EMR milestone in South Africa
The Eastern Cape Department of Health has announced that it has become the first province in South Africa to see EMRs implemented in more than 100 facilities, in a “significant step” toward moving away from paper-based records and building a connected health system.
The department shares hopes that the move will support the use of patient information in improving clinical decision-making, continuity of care, referrals, and follow-up. “From paper to digital. From fragmented records to better connected care. The Eastern Cape is changing how healthcare is delivered,” it states.
New York legislation requires EHR vendors to integrate organ donation functionality free of charge
Legislation introduced in New York requiring EHR vendors to integrate organ donation functionality is to go live on 21 December, 2026, dictating that this should be provided at no additional cost, as a component of existing or new implementations.
Vendors supplying EHRs to general hospitals and rural emergency hospitals will now need to include an option for New York State Donate Life Registry enrolment on patient-facing portals, the department of health outlines. These requirements also extend to hospitals operating their own patient portals or proprietary software.
The department of health and Donate Life New York State are currently working directly with EHR vendors to make these changes.
Korea-Mongolia partnership on digital transformation, training, and AI
Korea and Mongolia have launched a partnership across digital transformation, training, and AI. The partnership establishes a team-based training framework to strengthen Mongolian health professionals’ practical capabilities, and opens the door for cooperation on digital health and pharmacy procurement.
Building on the introduction of Korea’s primary care AI strategy, it also commits to providing technical assistance and knowledge sharing to further Mongolia’s digital transformation. Areas of focus will reportedly include health information systems, digital health tech, cybersecurity, data protection, and the use of AI to improve quality and access to health services.
Meta offers $2 million in funding to support health innovation at US universities
Researchers working on health innovation across five US universities are to be given a share of $2 million in grants from Meta for projects including conversational AI for dementia care, and identifying heart failure risk earlier. Meta is also providing access to its latest models to the teams, based out of Caltech, The Ohio State University, Louisiana State University, Indiana University, and UTHealth Houston.
At Indiana University, one of the projects to be funded is working on developing multimodal AI methods for analysing conversations involving older adults living with dementia, with hopes of informing conversational AI agents in supporting people with communication difficulties.
At the Ohio State University of Medicine, Meta’s open-weight models are being used to predict future heart failure with preserved ejection fraction risk, using routine abdominal CT scans, longitudinal health records, and ECG data. Separate projects are also looking at the use of AI in supporting radiologists with reading chest X-rays; and developing clinician-guided AI agents for Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
$4 million for kidney care EMR in Saskatchewan
A $4 million investment from the provincial kidney health programme in Saskatchewan is to support a modernised EMR for the management of kidney patients, aiming to ensure health teams have access to the same patient record, and that information follows patients wherever they receive care.
An EMR specifically for kidney care has been in place in the province since 1999, it notes, but this latest update will ensure automated dialysis data capture, centralised reporting, better information flow to other EMRs, and improved access to medical records for clinicians.
“Having every kidney clinic, dialysis unit, home dialysis program and transplant team in Saskatchewan on the same purpose-built system means a patient’s information follows them wherever they receive care, and it connects us more closely as one provincial program,” provincial medical lead James Barton says.
