Healthcare providers need to embrace digital transformation “for patient safety, faster claims for national health insurance reimbursement and to produce quality data for better care and research,” according to Dr Hyeoun-Ae Park, Emeritus dean at the Systems Biomedical Informatics Research Center of Seoul National University.

Dr Park is one of the speakers at the HIMSS21 APAC Conference discussing Healthcare of tomorrow today: Building futureproof health systems.

One of her consistent research themes is the use of standardised medical terminologies, and most recently she has been working on a project to introduce and disseminate the international standard SNOMED CT in Korea. This includes “training and educating policy makers, decision makers, implementers and mappers on what, why, when and how to use SNOMED CT,” Dr Park says.  

As part of the project, she been creating SNOMED CT reference sets for cancer big data platform and the use of SNOMED CT as standard terminology for electronic medical record (EMR) certification criteria.

“I have been also involved in improving consumers' access to the national health information portal by creating ontology and standard terminology-based health information content,” Dr Park explains. “Finally, I have been involved in clinical big data analytics to develop patient safety event prediction models and social big data analytics for sentiment analysis toward healthcare policies and topics.”

Informatics in nursing

As the first to offer a nursing informatics course in Korea, Dr Park played a vital role in introducing informatics to nursing education and nursing practice in the country.

She was also involved in implementing the first standard terminology-based electronic nursing records system in Korea.

“Almost 100% of Korean hospitals now use EMR systems,” says Dr Park. “Nursing schools teach students how to use ICT in order to prepare the students for use of EMR at workplaces. Most schools use simulators, sometimes virtual reality or augmented reality for fundamental nursing skills training.”

Ensuring quality data

As president of the Korea Medical Informatics Association (KOSMI), Dr Park helps to ensure healthcare data quality in South Korea.

One of the association’s focuses is establishing the interoperability of healthcare data through standards such as Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and SNOMED CT.

KOSMI is working on the re-use of electronic health record (EHR) data for patient care, research, and industry, through introducing a common data model. The association is also introducing the ‘My Healthway’ personal health record (PHR) platform for health information exchange.

Dr Park is speaking at the HIMSS21 APAC Conference during the keynote session, Healthcare of tomorrow today: Building futureproof health systems. This fully digital event will take place on 18 & 19 October and is free for all healthcare providers. Register here.