The official was speaking at the plenary session of the Vietnam Health Sector’s Digital Conversion Conference which took place in Hanoi on December 30.
According to the minister, despite having to fight the COVID-19 epidemic, the health sector has made solid efforts in digital transformation, initially recording encouraging results. Specifically, in the administrative field, 100% of administrative procedures in the sector have gone online at level 4 – the highest of Vietnam’s online public service system, while 100% of documents at the Ministry of Health are now being electronically processed with digital signatures applied, along with the continued reduction of paper records and administrative procedures in order to facilitate people and businesses.
Regarding the prevention of COVID-19, Long said that there are many lessons for successful epidemic prevention, one of which is to focus on promoting the application of IT, from which many software and applications have been born to serve in the fight against COVID-19. Vietnam was the first country in the world to apply electronic medical declarations to facilitate tracing and zoning work.
One of the most impressive activities is how the health sector has helped many people in different regions access quality medical services right in their residence, thanks to the deployment of a remote examination and treatment system. Within a short period of 45 days, the Ministry of Health, in collaboration with other related units, opened 1,000 remote medical service venues and by the end of this year, there were 1,500 established.
Long added that the system will connect all medical facilities across the country, as one of the top requirements of the Ministry of Health to improve the quality of medical examination and treatment on a spar amongst regions.
It is expected that by 2025, 100% of health facilities will participate in the remote medical examination and treatment system, including the private health system.
The participants press the launch button to open the three digital platforms serving digital conversion in the health sector. (Photo: suckhoedoisong.vn)
At the conference, the Vietnam Medical Network, the V20 Grassroots Medical Platform and the Electronic Health Record Platform were officially launched, the first an internal social network made by Vietnamese experts to help connect health workers across the nation in order to share their expertise.
V20 is a software for grassroots medical management that will come into use from January 2021, applied to nearly 12,000 clinics across the country to eliminate paperwork. With this software, departments of health can survey all the data of commune health stations in their localities, while the Ministry of Health can also refer to such data.
Meanwhile, the e-health record platform will help better manage health records of patients nationwide with nearly 98 million records getting updated regularly by health authorities. According to Minister Long, from July 2021, all outpatients will have to have electronic personal health records, and paper copies will be completely removed.
