Integrating images into the electronic patient record of the hospital authority of Hong Kong.

Over a period of 10 years the Hospital Authority has developed an integrated clinical information system (The Clinical Management System-CMS), including a territory-wide longitudinal electronic patient record (ePR). The CMS and ePR are used by over 4000 doctors and 20,000 other clinicians to document and review care. The ePR currently has nearly 3TB of data covering 44 million episodes for 6.4 million patients. To date the CMS has largely dealt with textual data. However, PACS technology is increasingly being adopted in the HA. This paper describes our strategy for taking the hospital image archives and making them available throughout the Authority as part of the longitudinal patient record, leveraging the ePR to distribute radiological and other images in a manner which is integrated, affordable and sustainable.