Several Philippine hospitals use the international message standard HL7. Dr.

Mike Muin disclosed in his blog post that The Medical City and St. Lukes (Quezon City and Bonifacio Global City) uses HL7 to integrate the laboratory information systems and radiology information system with hospital information systems. Surprisingly, the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), a tertiary- state owned hospital uses an open medical record system which has standards support for HL7 engine for data import (metahealthcare.com/projects/pgh). Also, according to Dr. Muins blog, there are ongoing multi-sectoral efforts to put the Philippines as an affiliated country with HL7.org. As of this writing, the Philippines is not yet an affiliate country of the HL7 International Council. But he is very optimistic that we will get the chance to be an affiliate soon. HL7 can greatly affect the future of healthcare industry in the country because it will improve health services if hospitals and organizations will follow same standards upon setting up their information management systems thus enabling them to exchange data. Using same standards is the key for interoperability. According to Wikipedia, interoperability is the ability of making systems and organizations to work together (inter-operate). There are three aspects of interoperability; technical which pertains to movement of data from one to another system, semantic which ensures the same understanding of data between two systems and process that enables business processes at organizations housing each of the systems to work together. Interoperability is equated with business benefits such as lowered costs of implementing clinical applications in hospitals. On the patients side, the cost of laboratory procedures will be less and no double jeopardy on pain with needle punctures if patient transfers to other hospitals because their medical and laboratory records can be accessed, understood in the same way and less cost for paper transfers as it will be done electronically. The Department of Health is pro-HL7. They are doing multi-sectoral efforts in improving healthcare in the country with the aid of ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies). In the Philippines eHealth Strategic Framework and Plan for 2013-2017 version 3.0 drafted by DOH, on their eHealth Action Plan, one of its components is standards and interoperability. It should promote and enable exchange of health information across geographical and health sector boundaries through use of common standards on data structure, terminologies, and messaging. One strategy to ensure compliance to health data standards for interoperability is the implementation of software certification or accreditation where eHealth solutions must comply in order to be certified as able to exchange health information. Last September 10, 2013, the office of the DOH secretary released an Administrative order no. 2013-0025 with the subject National Implementation of Health Data Standards for eHealth Standardization and Interoperability (eHSI Release 001). The release of the said Administrative order i s a response to the need of health data standards for adoption across the healthcare service delivery chain in the country and requirement of building data upon common definition, terminologies, elements, structures and organization both public and private. Although their manuscripts did not exactly termed this as HL7, it is safe to say that the DOH has clearly taken steps and actions to adopt a messaging standards to improve the nations healthcare delivery.

Source: http://mikemuin.com/tag/hl7-implementation/