The reformation of Information Supply chain in a developing country China’s hospital

Yuan Gao
Blog Submittion #1
 
The supply chain of healthcare system should not only include medicines, medical cares and medial equipment but also including the information of patients and doctor treatments. For the convenience of patient and efficiency of hospital operation, to supply the information in a lean manufacturing mode is necessary and beneficial.

The report “The Management of Hospital Supply chain VS Hospital Informatics System” introduces the new informatics system that China’s public hospital employing for better supply chain management in the healthcare industry. 

The report indicates that as a developing country, the Ministry of Health of China started to reform the information supply chain of public hospitals nationally from 2003. The information supply chain including the personal and health information of patients such as the history of seeing doctors, and the treatments (test, surgeries and medicines) being employed; the information of doctors who given a treatment to the patient before and the hospitals that the patient visited. The reformation can be said either simple or complicated in such a country with big population and large territory. The reformation is to make the information chain digitalized nationally--very simple—put everything into computer. Then the digitalized information will be accurate, quick, easy to take care, and relatively cheap! No need for actual storage room, less human capitals on information organizing, to reduce the communication time between hospital, doctor, nurse and patient and to avoid the mistakes caused by handwriting and information confusion.  However the digitalized process took about 5-8 years to complete in large cities and still continuing in small towns and suburban areas. The build of informatics network, the transfer from paper-based information to computer-based e-information, the training of being digital skilled for hospital workers. All of the above takes long time and big effort to complete.

But as a patient in china, I will say it is a worthy and positive change. I used to get confused on the handwriting of doctor note on my medical record; it somehow blocks the right to know of my own health condition as a patient. In fact in China, we used to have a common sense that only the doctor himself/herself can read his handwriting. So patients usually give up reading the medical record and this can result in being easily manipulated by doctor and hospital. I did not notice that this could be a problem until I got a clear printed note from the doctor and easily read it to know my health problem.

“What the smartphone can do to help for the information supply chain in this digital age?”

Reference:

http://www.gs1.org/docs/healthcare/members/061009/HK3_Gao_China_supply_chain.pdf