The Dubai Health Authority, DHA, is integrating biomedical devices to the Salama Medical Records System in high acuity areas in certain DHA hospitals, according to a top health official.

Salama is the name of the authority’s electronic patient medical record project. The DHA-wide project will ensure electronic patient medical records are is available across the DHA health facilities. Additionally, it will help provide patients access to their medical record through a patient portal.

The project will ensure that every patient visiting a DHA health facility has an electronic medical file, which will be accessible across DHA hospitals and health centres.

In line with this project, the DHA’s Information Technology Department is integrating 834 bio-medical devices, mainly ventilators, anesthesia machines, dialysis machines, cardiac monitors, fetal monitors and incubators, throughout Salama Wave 1 and Wave 2 rollouts.

The move provides a way to simplify workflow, eliminates human intervention and errors in recording, enhances efficiency and helps doctors with evidence-based decision-making. Additionally, another 400 devices will be integrated along with the Salama wave 3 roll out.

Amani Al Jassmi, Director of Information Technology at the DHA, said, "All the patient’s vital signs are automatically sent from biomedical devices to the DHA’s electronic medical records system. This allows the clinician to focus more on direct patient care by quickly validating the vital signs in the system. Elimination of manual entry increases clinical satisfaction and improves patient care and safety."

Currently, patients who visit certain DHA health facilities have their medical record available electronically on the Salama EMR system, eliminating the need for manual files and ensuring that if they visit multiple DHA health facilities they still have only one unified medical record.

The DHA’s IT department has unified about 1.4 million patient records and migrated them to the new Salama system. More than 112 million transactions were migrated before April 2017, and since then, an additional 30 million transactions have been migrated in order to support the wave 2 rollout.

The Salama EMR system was integrated with 25 core DHA clinical systems such as dental, lab, radiology etc. during their wave 1 roll out in April, and was further reintegrated with seven more systems to increase efficiency and data flow. This includes eight government entities.

By November, the Salama programme roll out will be completed, ensuring all DHA health facilities have Electronic Medical Records and that the Authority moves to a paperless system.