IT USED to take one or two days to dispatch a patient's medical record from one public hospital to another, if a request was made for it.
From tomorrow, this can be done quickly and electronically, as all seven hospitals, 17 polyclinics and six specialist centres in the public sector start to share patient records.
This means, for example, the record of a patient in Singapore General Hospital (SGH), which comes under the SingHealth Group, can be viewed by a doctor treating him in Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), which is managed by the other health cluster, the National Healthcare Group.
To start, 650,000 discharge summaries of patients admitted to public hospitals since 2001 have been put in the $500,000 system, which is called EMR Exchange, or EMRX.
The Health Ministry hopes to include outpatient records, X-rays and lab reports by the end of the year.
In recent weeks, the individual clusters had rolled out systems sharing such resources within their own facilities only.
Work on pooling records across clusters began last October, in the drive to make the health-care system more 'patient-centric', said Health Ministry deputy secretary Goh Aik Guan yesterday at a press briefing.
Acting Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan has emphasised that health-care delivery should focus on the patient.
In an emergency, being able to obtain a patient's medical history on the fly will result in prompt action or treatment.
Shared records will also be crucial in a public health crisis. During the Sars outbreak last year, a patient who had been infected at TTSH sparked an outbreak at SGH when he was treated by doctors who were unaware of this.
Some 240,000 patients are referred between public health-care institutions every year.
Of these, a quarter are referred from one cluster to another.
However, not everything will be reflected in the shared records.
Sensitive information such as positive HIV status, psychiatric history and previous pregnancy terminations will not be listed.
Also, only doctors will have access to the records.
What will be shared is the patient's recent hospital episodes, including diagnoses, prescriptions and drug allergies.
The system can also track - with time and date stamps - who has accessed a patient's record.
This is to ensure patient confidentiality is 'respected and protected', said Mr Goh - just as in the days of paper records.