Electronic health record system (EHRS) is an important healthcare innovation associated with many controversies about the benefits and challenges to different stakeholders. The aim of this study was to investigate the utility of EHRS by outpatient physicians in Macao and to identify, in their opinions, the significance of EHRS on health institutes, patients, and physicians. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 32 physicians who worked in the outpatient department. The interview data showed that 78% physicians interviewed used EHRS frequently during their daily practice despite individual preferences of documentation methods. They agreed that systemic health record offered by EHRS allowing smooth communication was beneficial to the health institutes, patients and physicians. However, privacy and confidentiality concerned both the health institutes and patients. Inefficiency of the EHRS that only allowed retrieval of limited medical information of the patients hindered physicians' acceptability of EHRS. It was also suggested that the health institutes should take into consideration interests of different stakeholders when designing and implementing EHRS.

Chemical fingerprinting is currently a widely used tool that enables rapid and accurate quality evaluation of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). However, chemical fingerprints are not amenable to information storage, recognition, and retrieval, which limit their use in Chinese medicine traceability. In this study, samples of three kinds of Chinese medicines were randomly selected and chemical fingerprints were then constructed by using high performance liquid chromatography. Based on chemical data, the process of converting the TCM chemical fingerprint into two-dimensional code is presented; preprocess and filtering algorithm are also proposed aiming at standardizing the large amount of original raw data. In order to know which type of two-dimensional code (2D) is suitable for storing data of chemical fingerprints, current popular types of 2D codes are analyzed and compared. Results show that QR Code is suitable for recording the TCM chemical fingerprint. The fingerprint information of TCM can be converted into data format that can be stored as 2D code for traceability and quality control.

Currently, the chemical fingerprint comparison and analysis is mainly based on professional equipment and software, it’s expensive and inconvenient. This study aims to integrate QR (Quick Response) code with quality data and mobile intelligent technology to develop a convenient query terminal for tracing quality in the whole industrial chain of TCM (traditional Chinese medicine). Three herbal medicines were randomly selected and their chemical two-dimensional barcode (2D) barcodes fingerprints were constructed. Smartphone application (APP) based on Android system was developed to read initial data of 2D chemical barcodes, and compared multiple fingerprints from different batches of same species or different species. It was demonstrated that there were no significant differences between original and scanned TCM chemical fingerprints. Meanwhile, different TCM chemical fingerprint QR codes could be rendered in the same coordinate and showed the differences very intuitively. To be able to distinguish the variations of chemical fingerprint more directly, linear interpolation angle cosine similarity algorithm (LIACSA) was proposed to get similarity ratio. This study showed that QR codes can be used as an effective information carrier to transfer quality data. Smartphone application can rapidly read quality information in QR codes and convert data into TCM chemical fingerprints.