Health and Biomedical Informatics Research Center, Urmia University of Medical Sciences, Urmia, Iran , nourani.a@umsu.ac.ir
Abstract: (19 Views)
Dear Editor,
The Iranian Electronic Health Record (SEPAS) was launched in 2007 as a national project to store health-related information on all Iranian citizens from before birth to after death in the Statistics and Information Technology Office of the Ministry of Health (1). The main goal of this project was to move away from paper records and align with the growth of the global digital health system, and create a secure platform for sharing citizens’ health information when needed (2). This sharing was defined primarily to help diagnose and treat patients and provide better care, and later for secondary uses such as education, research, policymaking, and disease and epidemic surveillance (3). In general, the Iranian Electronic Health Record is theoretically in line with international standards. However, in terms of operation, despite the passage of 18 years since the project began and 99 percent of the country’s hospitals being connected to this system and data being transferred through provincial nodes to the ministry level, what has happened in reality is that this system has not been integrated into actual clinical processes (2).
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