Possibility of Funds for eHealth

Ying Liu made this Freedom of Information request to Innovation and Technology Commission

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Response to this request is long overdue. By law, under all circumstances, Innovation and Technology Commission should have responded by now (details). You can complain by requesting an internal review.

Dear Innovation and Technology Commission,

Developed by the Hong Kong Government, the Electronic Health Record Sharing System (eHealth) provides an electronic platform that aims to build up a territory-wide a territory-wide platform for healthcare consultation and lifelong electronic health records for all members of the public. Therefore, the participation level of healthcare institutions is vital for the efficiency of the eHealth system and among all healthcare institutions, private hospitals and clinics play important roles in the eHealth system.

However, we notice that for private hospitals and clinics that have not joined the electronic health record sharing system, the main concerns are technical problems and the lack of technical assistance. The Food and Health Bureau only provides contact information for technology providers to private medical institutions that want to join ehealth. For Healthcare providers, they need to hire vendors to install and maintain that software. We believe that for small private hospitals or clinics, having a program to subsidize the installation and maintenance of software will greatly increase enrollment in the private sector.

Here are my questions for the commission to answer under the Code on Access to Information.
1. Has the commission funded any institutions or projects related to Ehealth through the Technology Voucher Programme or other funding scheme? If so please provide more info or refer us to the online records. (we did a search on the website:https://www.itf.gov.hk/en/project-search... but didn’t find anything directly related to eHealth)
2. Does the commission think it is possible to collaborate with the Food and Health Bureau to create a program to fund small clinics to install and maintain eHealth-related systems?
We’d also take the opportunity to suggest that the Technology Voucher Programme and the Food and Health Bureau should cooperate to set up a special fund for private hospitals (especially small clinics) who want to join eHealth

In case you want to learn more about eHealth, we've listed the links below for your reference.
https://apps11.ehealth.gov.hk/hcp/tc/
https://www.ehealth.gov.hk/tc/faq/index....
https://www.ehealth.gov.hk/tc/healthcare...
https://www.ehealth.gov.hk/tc/whats-new/...
https://www.ehealth.gov.hk/tc/whats-new/...

Yours faithfully,
WU Yuchen
LIU Ying