Korea University Anam Hospital is now recognised as one of the most digitally mature hospitals in the world. 

In March, the 1,000-bed hospital was reported to have scored 308/400 for the HIMSS Digital Health Indicator (DHI), a measure of the digital maturity of a health organisation in four dimensions: governance and workforce, interoperability, person-enabled health, and predictive analytics. Its DHI score is currently the third highest globally, following Hospital Authority Hong Kong.

Among the four areas of DHI, it scored the highest in interoperability, which also tops all other health systems in the world. KU Anam attributes this to its cloud-based HIS. 

Last year, the hospital implemented the Precision Hospital Information System (P-HIS). In a presentation at HIMSS22 APAC, Dr Sang-Heon Lee, Head of Medical Science and Information Unit at KU Anam, said they developed the system to combine data stored in individual KU Hospitals to form big data on the cloud. 

The 38-module system, which is now live across KU Anam, Guro and Ansan Hospitals, also provides international standardisation of clinical terminologies and simplifies data post-processing.

Following its implementation, KU Anam saw improvement in care quality, particularly a 40% increase in patient treatment hours, as well as a 60% decrease in the time needed to inspect prescription input errors. It has also saved 40% in operational technology costs. 

By using P-HIS, writing time for nurses also went down from 15 minutes to 5 min.

As the hospital is now able to produce big data, KU Anam has also developed a clinical data warehouse to analyse and perform AI modelling based on big data. This enables the hospital to further discover new AI solutions, drugs, and drug substances.

"The main job of the hospital is to save patients. But in KU Anam, we are not only going to do our best to save patients but we are also going to focus on research, particularly on harnessing big data to develop new clinical solutions," Dr Lee said.