Information must come from various sources and all doctors should have access, they say
Hong Kong must end its culture of information black-outs to build a vast central infectious diseases database linking all its doctors to tackle future outbreaks, medical experts said yesterday.
Vital data should come from various sources, including the Department of Health, the Hospital Authority and private and public medical practitioners and should also take into account information such as media reports and rumours, said Anthony Hedley, community medicine chairman at the University of Hong Kong.
'I think an information system, to be trusted fully, needs to gather information from many sources,' he said. 'We need good information in order to achieve good management of the Sars outbreak and other communicable diseases.'
Medical practitioners are required by law to report notifiable diseases, including chicken pox and tuberculosis, to the Department of Health. But there is no sharing of medical information with all practitioners. The department also does not track useful medical information, such as the kinds of drugs used and a patient's reaction to them.
With the Sars outbreak, the department created e-Sars, a computerised system that recorded basic information about all Sars patients, including their age and sex. The problem is that it can only be accessed by those in the department or Hospital Authority, which includes all public hospitals. Private physicians contribute data but cannot access it.
The government got $78 million in funding two years ago to create the Public Health Information System to store data about the mortality and hospital admission rates, disease incidence and prevalence and health-care expenditure. A department spokeswoman said it was in stage one of the three-part system.