President Chinchilla has learned about advances in the digitization of health services from Korean authorities, and urged the Social Security Institute to seek advice on the subject.

An opinion piece in Nacion.com details that “after visiting a hospital in Korea, where she could observe the benefits of electronic medical records, President Laura Chinchilla was frankly impatient with the Social Security Institute, whose intentions to adopt the Expediente Digital Único en Salud, EDUS, (Unique Digital Health Record) date from 1998. Fourteen years is a generous timeframe, but the advances have been few. The president, with a sense of urgency, has asked the Department to desist from developing the program in house and seek international assistance.”

Obviously, such systems are used in Korea, with clear benefits to users in terms of cost and overall efficiency.

The fact is that “electronic files, it must be said, go against some of the institution’s major interests over the years. For starters, there is a large bureaucracy devoted to managing manual records, without counting the computer technicians hired to develop the system, with much patience. Digitization also means greater control over appointments, medical staff productivity, use of equipment and drug delivery.”

Source: Nacion.com