The Ministry of Health and Welfare will promote a five-year "next-generation digital medical information upgrade project" to bring medical records to the public in order to keep up with international standards. According to Dr. Chung-Liang Shih, deputy miniter of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, a project office is expected to be set up by the end of the year or early next year to address issues such as the difficulty of introducing AI applications into medical information systems, access to medical devices, and international cooperation.

However, as the system was originally designed to assist with health insurance claims, it is difficult for hospitals to exchange information with each other, and it is even more difficult to connect to international standards, which indirectly limits the scope of smart medical applications.

With the advent of the AI era, the Ministry of Health and Welfare is promoting the next-generation digital medical information upgrade project, and will seek funding for implementation from 2023 to 2027.

The project office is expected to include members from the Department of Medical Affairs, the CDC, the Health Insurance Administration and the National Health Service. He said that in addition to the hospital's own electronic medical record system, there is also health insurance information that needs to be connected to the public sector.

In the past, medical records were managed under individual hospitals, but through the medical information upgrade project, medical records will be transformed into a "patient centre", Shi said, hoping to achieve the goal of "taking medical records with you". In addition, the information systems of various medical institutions are highly customised and there is no common platform to import and link them together.

He said that the first step is to start industry-government-academia discussions to define a medical information system that meets the next-generation objectives, defining the features, functions and architecture; secondly, public hospitals will be used as a testing ground and a tender process will be conducted to allow those who meet the requirements to enter into actual operation. In the future, there will also be a subsidy scheme to enable hospitals with less capacity to upgrade their HIS.