Electronic Health Record: A Cost Effective Model for Developing Economies

Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are useful for any medical organizations in terms of reducing costs, saving time needed to access patient's records as well as increasing quality of patient's care. Fiji has an existing EHR System called PATISPlus but due to lack of usability and awareness this system is not popular and extensively used. The system furthermore has created bad user experience thus forcing many medical practitioners to use manual records extensively. Based on the basis of information obtained from a review of research papers, this paper examines certain factors that may inhibit adoption of EHR system such as E-prescription on a national scale in Fiji and suggest certain solutions to them. We propose a model of an open source web-based national EHR system to alleviate some of those concerns especially in regards to cost that a developing nation like Fiji can use. This research is proposing a more user-friendly cloud based framework with focus on backend research opportunity through big data analysis. Extending this new system to a national level would provide extensive societal benefits to the medical community, Pharmacist, Data science researcher and even the national policy makers.