The largest electronic health system in Saudi Arabia has gone fully operational following a series of successful tests. Automatically accessible to all Armed Forces Hospitals, the system serves to eliminate duplication of patient records, besides streamlining procedures and allowing for speedy and efficient administration. The project involved indexing and tabulating hundreds of thousands of paper and digital medical files of Armed Forces personnel, designing a registration program especially for the Ministry of Defense and linking it to the medical systems of Nexus. The Nexus system is applied in a number of other hospitals in Saudi Arabia and more than 600 hospitals in Europe, United States and other parts of the world. Prince Khalid Bin Sultan, Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector General for Military Affairs, has been in the forefront of the Nexus project's implementation in the Armed Forces hospitals, which is central to the Armed Forces Hospitals Development Project. The Arabian Company for Trade and Industrial System (Alcantara), the exclusive agent for Nexus AG of Germany and the Swedish enterprise resource planning applications company IFS, was contracted by the General Department of Medical Services at the Ministry of Defense for installing and operating integrated and unified medical and financial management systems in the Armed Forces hospitals, said Eng. Khalid Al-Sulaimani, CEO and president of Alcantara Co. Alcantara was also contracted to establish five major information centers to serve the western, central, north-western, southern, and eastern regions, he said. The CEO of Alcantara, which participated in the Fifth Conference of the medical ser-vices of the Armed Forces, said his company “is committed to the government's goal of providing good health care on scientific bases.” “The contract covers a total of 26 hospitals and more than 100 polyclinics,” Al-Sulaimani said. “The Armed Forces hospitals in the north-western region of Tabuk were the first hospitals to successfully have a fully operational united information system, which was inaugurated in March 2007 by Prince Khalid Bin Sultan.” Weeks later, the hospitals of the Ministry of Defense and Aviation in southern Khamis Mushayt were linked to the unified information system, he added. The five regional information centers were set up and made operational based on Sun Microsystems and Oracle databases and under the umbrella of UNIX system, within the first year, Al-Sulaimani said. “The project is considered as the largest electronic health system ever in Saudi Arabia,” he said. “It aims to overcome the phenomenon of duplication and scattering of Armed Forces members' medical files in their various locations.” So far, the first phase of the unified information system has been successfully completed. It covers data on patients' admissions, discharge and transfer systems, management of outpatient clinics, and patients' registration, pharmaceutical and laboratories systems. Systems users - administrators, doctors and laboratory technicians, pharmacies - can now access all information on patients in a unified electronic file that can be accessed easily and automatically. The fully Arabicized system has contributed to improving work efficiency, saving a lot of time and effort, and streamlining patients' procedures, Al-Sulaimani said. The financial and administrative systems of IFS have helped facilitate administration of accounting, procurement and storerooms, he added. These IFS systems were prepared for government use in general and for defense systems in particular, and they are compatible with the medical systems. “Now, our technical team, which includes local experts supported by German and Swedish technicians and doctors, is getting ready to implement the second and final phase in the northern-west region hospitals,” Al-Sulaimani said. “This phase includes, for example, systems for the radiology section of the intensive care unit, the heart diseases treatment unit, the intensive care unit, and the radiotherapy, nuclear medicine, nutrition and dialysis units. Work is expected to be completed before the middle of next year.”
