In order to bring Taiwan's electronic medical records (EMR) in line with international standards and to expand the development opportunities of Taiwanese manufacturers in the medical industry, the Ministry of Health and Welfare will officially implement a new version of the regulations realted to EMR management in 2022, which will create a triple-win situation for patients, hospitals and the industry. With the acquisition of Oracle's Value Added Distributor (VAD) status in 2022, WiAdvance has been able to further integrate Oracle's hardware and software products to create more value-added cloud solutions. 

Jason Lo, Vice President of WiAdvance, pointed out that the new version of the regulations allows Taiwan's EMR to be connected to the international FHIR exchange standard and become part of the global medical industry ecosystem. He further said that the trend of smartization has changed the structure of medical systems, with large information devices that used to demand powerful functions gradually moving towards cloud service oriented platforms, and these new platform standards are all FHIR.

However, the structure of an intelligent medical system is complex and the functional requirements of each hospital are highly repetitive. If each hospital chooses to build its own system, not only will the system's heavy industry lead to a waste of social resources, but also the decentralized structure of the self-built system will require upgrades and maintenance one by one in the future, which will bring high operating costs to the hospital. Based on the needs of frontliners, WiAdvance designed the FHIR Portal platform, which can be easily imported by hospital users through a "subscription system" in WiAdance's smart cloud marketplace, effectively reducing the threshold for maintenance and transformation.

WiAdvance's FHIR Portal platform has built-in conversion modules that allow users to easily convert outpatient, emergency, inpatient, test, image report and medical record summary data into the international standard FHIR format without having to compare FHIR IG and Resource files one by one, significantly improving the efficiency of the conversion process. The platform has already been used by a number of medical institutions to develop various smart medical functions.

Oracle is the leading data centre brand and its products have long been used by large medical centres around the world to meet the industry's needs in terms of functional design and integration. In the cloud, Oracle's OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) has a FHIR API, which allows medical system data to be converted to this standard quickly, Lo added.

The Oracle database is widely recognized for its stability, security and scalability, and many of Taiwan's medical information systems are already running on the Oracle database. According to Lo, the greatest added value of medical data will be the interoperability between out-of-hospital services and institutions, and the FHIR standard is a necessary bridge to link internal and external systems.

The data standard of the ambulance system in the ambulance is different from that of the hospital, so when an emergency patient arrives at the hospital, the doctor has to re-read the medical records and the information collected previously. As the data from both systems are FHIR-compliant, there is no need to translate the information. Such applications can be extended to other areas, for example, in recent years Taiwan has started to integrate medical forces and resources within the same region in the form of "joint prevention within a region".

According to Lo, EMR moving to the cloud and the implementation of the FHIR standard have accelerated the emergence of various medical cloud applications. At present, the company has assisted a number of medical institutions in implementing smart applications and providing flexible hybrid cloud services. The "WiAdvance APP Market" platform also provides SaaS subscription services to simplify the selection of vendors and the purchase process through a one-stop operation process, lowering the threshold for digital transformation of medical institutions. In the future, through cross-discipline cooperation, Taiwan's smart medical services will go overseas to seize huge business opportunities.

Source (in Chinese)https://www.digitimes.com.tw/iot/article.asp?id=0000654823_RRV75S0N3QPJEN2NU9UV0