Abu Dhabi Health Services Company (SEHA) has enhanced the automation of medical record system for patients through its ‘Malaffi’ programme to help cut medication errors and to increase physician access to clinical information.

Launched by SEHA in 2007, Malaffi aims to merge all medical information on patients – such as medical records, pharmaceutical prescriptions, diagnostic information, and other data – that is held within all of Seha’s hospitals and clinics deployed in Abu Dhabi, into one digital file.  

The programme comes in line with Seha's objective to achieve the eGovernment vision of ‘One Patient, One Record,’ said the company in its statement.

It aims to reduce medication errors and increase physician access to clinical information besides enhancing the response time to patients and eliminating redundant tests and data collection.

Seha said it has implemented the programme in a number of its hospitals and facilities, which has enabled six hospitals to achieve level six certification in the electronic medical records (EMR) Adoption Model of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS).

This certification ranks Seha among the highest ranking hospitals as compared to the US and the Asia-Pacific region, which use the same model.

These hospitals are namely Corniche Hospital, Madinat Zayed Hospital, Tawam Hospital, Al Ain Hospital, Al Rahba Hospital, all of which attained the sixth phase of the HIMSS Analytics’ EMR Adoption Model during the years 2012 and 2013, said the statement.

Commenting on the new system, Saif Daoud Al Siksek, the group deputy, chief information technology officer said, “We are dedicated to providing healthcare to the people of Abu Dhabi in accordance with the highest international standards. This system provides more security and safety for patients when medicine is prescribed by doctors."

"It conforms to the highest international standards in the field of safety for medication administration. It is also a reliable source for medical records management and analysis, and aims to provide a complete medical record of the patient,: said the senior SEHA official.

"SEHA benchmarks its hospitals against internationally-recognised best practices. At the same time, it is keen to achieve the eGovernment vision – ‘One Patient, One Record' – the goals of which are to enable population health management across this developed system, along with chronic disease management, as well as providing an electronic system with wide reporting capabilities, in order to enhance research capabilities,” he stated.

Saif Al Siksek pointed out that when a personal health record is rolled out, the Malaffi system will allow stakeholders to communicate with physicians, schedule appointments, and request refills at a countrywide level.

"It will also allow the possibility of maintaining and updating data in an easy and quick manner, and for government quality/regulatory initiatives to be implemented. In addition, the patients themselves can enjoy numerous benefits the overall cost was negligible in terms of interoperability issues and training costs, particularly for clinicians that practice at multiple facilities." he stated.

"In addition, the total cost of ownership was significantly lower overall as a result, he added.

Bader Bader Al Qubaisi, the corporate infrastructure and technology manager of SEHA, said one of the most recent achievements made as a result of the application of Malaffi is its integration with the Health Authority of Abu Dhabi (HAAD) sick leave reporting system.

"SEHA and HAAD agreed upon an integrated online sick leave process whereby physicians enter only additional information in Malaffi, and the data will then be electronically submitted to HAAD," he noted.

"This has reduced the time of sick leave issuance to one minute only, where previously the process used to take approximately 20 minutes. During the past four months, around 135,000 eSick submissions have been entered via Malaffi," he added.

Apart from being eco-friendly, Malaffi provides ease and speed of EMR access via medical staff for more than 1.7 million patients. The data involved usually includes date of symptoms onset, blood type, recommended medications, and X-rays, as well as other tests on patients.-TradeArabia News Service