Investigation and Countermeasures Research of Hospital Information Construction of Tertiary Class-A Public Hospitals in China: Questionnaire Study

Abstract

Background Medical informatization has initially demonstrated its advantages in improving the medical service industry. Over the past decade, the Chinese government have made a lot of effort to complete infrastructural information construction in the medical and health domain, and smart hospitals will be the next priority according to policies released by Chinese government in recent years. Objective To provide strategic support for further development of medical information construction in China, this study aimed to investigate the current situation of medical information construction in tertiary class-A public hospitals and analyze the existing problems and countermeasures. Methods This study surveyed 23 tertiary class-A public hospitals in China who voluntarily responded to a self-designed questionnaire distributed in April 2020 to investigate the current medical information construction status. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the current configurations of hospital information department, hospital information systems, hospital internet service and its application, and the satisfaction of hospital information construction. Interviews were also conducted with the respondents in this study for requirement analysis. Results The results show that hospital information construction has become one of the priorities of the hospitals’ daily work, and the medical information infrastructural construction and internet service application of the hospitals are good; however, a remarkable gap among the different level of hospitals can be observed. Although most hospitals had built their own IT team to undertake information construction work, the actual utilization rate of big data collected and stored in the hospital information system was not satisfactory. Conclusions Support for the construction of information technology in primary care institutions should be increased to balance the level of development of medical informatization in medical institutions at all levels. The training of complex talents with both IT and medical backgrounds should be emphasized, and specialized disease information standards should be developed to lay a solid data foundation for data utilization and improve the utilization of medical big data.

Service quality evaluation of county-level public hospitals in Chongqing under smart healthcare

“…"Secure payment" has the highest service quality score among the 24 entries and is recognized by patients, indicating that patients have a good experience in payment experience and need to be further maintained [29,30]. "The reason is that there are too many systems in the hospital and different departments are severely fragmented [31], so it is di cult to communicate with each other. To solve this problem, hospitals need to strengthen top-level design, unify the system construction of each department as much as possible, establish an integrated hospital information system, break the phenomenon of information silos, and realize data interoperability; establish a one-stop access platform for patients to realize the whole process platform for patients' appointment, consultation, payment, medication pickup, admission, and discharge [32], so that patients can simply access various information during consultation, improve transparency, reduce information asymmetry between doctors and patients, and improve patients' trust and satisfaction with the hospital [33].…”