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| Nothing tasting better than a Corona (except a Heineken of course) |
It had been only one week since eating out in Mexico City at
night and having a Corona or two, that I landed in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia during
the Corona virus scare. This virus has nothing to do with the famous Mexican
beer but rather is an abbreviation of Coronaviridae, the name of a
family of RNA viruses. It is also known as the MERS or Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome.
Apparently when I landed in the region, a visitor had just
died and the death toll was up to almost 70 people, while there are more than
200 cases reported. Unfortunately, the whole affair overshadowed the second
HIMSSME conference in this city as healthcare public officials were more
worried about the public unrest and concerns than paying attention to the
conference.
Interestingly enough, the advent of health care IT implementations,
and especially the reporting, surveillance, and analytics of healthcare
information, as shown at the IHE showcase during the conference, is exactly
what would assist in the management of such outbreaks.
Talking about the IHE showcase, this year was a major
improvement over last year’s first exhibit. There were two use cases shown,
each with eight stations, but despite the fact that there were “only” two, it
would take at least a whole hour to go through each one of them to appreciate
all of the details of how these systems could communicate.
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| Busy booth of MOH (ministry of Health) |
The good news of this show was that there was a lot of
“kicking the tires,” as there are several major tenders out to be awarded in
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is making a major investment in healthcare
infrastructure. In contrast to the United States, where the implementation of
public Health Information Exchanges (HIE’s), which will serve as the hubs to
register and even be repositories for regional health care systems is still progressing
very slowly, the feeling is that in Saudi Arabia there will be a very fast-paced
and massive implementation in the very near term in this region. In addition to
the infrastructure being put in place, the feeder hospitals and clinics will
need upgrades to their PACS systems to install Vendor Neutral Archives (VNA’s)
that can communicate with the infrastructure using the applicable IHE profiles
(PIX/PDX, XDS). Key to the success of
this initiative is that all the Electronic Health Records need to be ready to
exchange information using standard communication protocols and especially the
new templates in the form of CDA (Clinical Document Architecture) so that
instead of shuffling documents back and forth the data can be imported and exported
electronically.
Despite the virus outbreak, the HIMSSME was very well
attended, and the smaller scale made it easy to get around and spend a lot of
time with the vendors that were present. Instead of relying on local dealers,
many vendors are now opening their own offices, either forced by the fact that
the service and support has been generally very poor by their local
representatives, or because of conditions written in the outstanding tenders. I
would argue that if a dealer does not perform, it is in many cases due to
insufficient training and support by the parent company, but there is no
question that a wholly owned operation is often managed more effectively. A
potential issue is the ever-increasing requirement by the Saudi government to
hire a certain percentage of Saudi nationals, which as of now is 25 percent. This
may be a temporary issue as there currently is a lack of skills and training
among these professionals, but with the ever increasing stream of young
graduates coming back to their country after being sent abroad to study in
first class universities, many of them in the USA, there should be a sufficient
labor pool available, if not now, then very soon.
The virus outbreak was indeed an annoyance. The fact that
many of the children were kept home from school did indirectly impact me, as many
of the non-essential healthcare workers such as IT personnel, which I would
have liked to visit with in Jeddah, stayed home, which was kind of a bummer.
Anyway, a good reason to come back to Saudi Arabia next time, may not be Jeddah
but Mecca, which is one hour away. Consequently, the plane was 90 percent filled
with pilgrims, all dressed in their white loin cloths and shawls, which definitely
made me feel out of place, but they were all very friendly and accommodating. This
is what makes travel interesting and never boring.
