Reply To: Week 1 Topic 3

[Ching To Chung]

Besides telehealth, I think the Internet has transformed a lot of aspects in health service delivery to make things more reliable and convenient for both workers and patients. In Hong Kong, the traditional way of scheduling a doctor’s appointment is to call in. This is now replaced by apps, where patients could fill in their information and make an appointment without calling. This decreases the workload of nurses and receptionists when they used to pick up the phone to schedule an appointment or answer questions before. I also get a lot of automated reminders on my phone, reminding me to pay my hospital fees or attend the PET scan tomorrow, or my medicines are ready and I could go pick it up now. This is all possible due to a well-built information system, which saves a lot of time and labour when these reminders had to be done by humans in the old days. And finally of course, electronic health records. The internet has made the paperless norm possible, where large amount of medical information could be sent, and doctors from different hospitals are able to view them. The patient no longer needs to bring a bunch of hard copy reparts.