Da Nang has issued a plan to boost digital transformation in the healthcare sector by 2025, with a vision to 2030, with the intention of identifying it as a central and cross-cutting task in facilitating organisations and individuals operating in this sector to enhance  the efficiency of medical examination and treatment.

Many hospitals and medical facilities in Da Nang has promoted the application of digital technology in medical examination and treatment activities. Medical examination and treatment at the pictured Thien Nhan Hospital is more effective thanks to the application of digital software. Photo: T.Y

Doctor Tran Thanh Thuy, the Deputy Director in charge of the Da Nang Department of Health, said that IT technical infrastructure of the Da Nang medical system basically meets the city’s needs in applying digital technology, forming a smart healthcare with 3 main pillars: smart disease prevention; smart medical examination and treatment; smart medical management.

The Da Nang administration has issued an architectural framework for IT application in the healthcare sector, enhancing the ability to integrate healthcare services such as registration of vaccination schedules, online medical examination and treatment, non-cash payment and electronic medical records.

In particular, in an initiative move, the Da Nang Department of Health has launched an emulation of digital transformation in the health sector, taken solutions to build smart hospitals and effectively applied Telehealth - a remote health check-up and treatment system, the Viet Nam Health Declaration app, the national communicable disease supervision system, and the national drug supply system.

In other great pieces of effort, the Department issued a plan to implement the project on developing the application of population database, e-identification and e-authentication for national digital transformation in the 2022-2025 period with a vision towards 2030 in the medical field. economic.

In parallel with that, it is recommended that medical examination and treatment units pilot medical examination and treatment covered by health insurance with chip-based citizen identification and establish a steering committee for digital transformation of the healthcare sector as well.

Thanks to active digital transformation, up to now, 100% of wards and commune-level healthcare stations have deployed electronic health applications and all district-level health centres and general hospitals have applied electronic hospital management applications and medical examination and treatment, along with implementing electronic medical record formation and patient management codes.

The investment in digital equipment infrastructure is carried out synchronously, especially operating a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) which is a medical imaging technology which provides economical storage and convenient access to images from multiple modalities (source machine types) between a number of district-level health centres and the Da Nang General Hospital.

Some hospitals such as the city’s hospitals of Oncology, and Maternity and Paediatrics are in the process of piloting the PACS system for diagnostic imaging, e-admission kiosk solution for a digitised patient journey (a real physical reception point, the admission kiosk allows the management of all arrival flows) and electronic treatment protocol management.

By 2025, Da Nang will have 100% of wards and commune-level healthcare stations capable of providing medical examination and treatment for people through the remote support and the consultation of medical experts at the upper level and maintain over 97% of people with electronic health records and 100% of the hospitals using electronic health records.

In 2023, Da Nang will continue to develop a project to develop smart healthcare, smart hospitals, online medical care, and upgrade the database system and citisen health records.

Reporting by TIEU YEN - Translating by A.THU