Ching To Chung

From the paper, I think integration with an electronic information management system would improve the two indicators of flexibiliy and representativeness.
Flexbility refers to the ability to change information needs or operating conditions with little additional resources. For the system, it is able to adapt and comply with WHO’s new case…[Read more]

1. Verification & preparation:
Information technology could help the collection of data for outbreak investigation. By collecting data electronically, it could help identify outbreak and clusters more easily. We can more easily judge if there is an outbreak through electronical medical records (EMR). For example, we could plot all suspected cases…[Read more]

Among the technologies, I think I like Data-visualization tools for decision support the most. Data dashboard is becoming more and more widely used in many fields today, including public health surveillance. Real-time data is visualized to provide an intuitive and clear view of the current situation to keep the public informed. I remembered that…[Read more]

1. How can surveillance help to detect and control the disease?

Surveillance can play a role in detecting and controlling monkeypox by providing timely and accurate information about the incidence, spread, and trends of the disease. Since monkeypox is contagious, by detecting the early signs of an outbreak, we could give medical interventions…[Read more]

Should you give the data out?
I would only consider giving the data out after sufficient steps are done to ensure that none of my participant’s privacy would be violated and that all of my actions are in line with the local privacy laws. If this is not possible, I would refuse to give out the data.

How do you not violate any of the General…[Read more]

This is a very difficult but interesting dilemma.

What should you do?
I would be emotionally tempted to tell, but as a professional I must surpress my personal instinct and protect my patient’s privacy at all costs. It is my professional ethics and obligation to safeguard the privacy of my patients. Therefore, I would not tell my friend and I…[Read more]

I would like to talk about the “LeaveHomeSafe” COVID surveillance system implemented in Hong Kong during the pandemic. During the pandemic, the government forced all citizens to use the system’s app and scan QR codes wherever they go to track their location. This is a change that failed miserably, and many things went wrong in its implementation…[Read more]

I would like to again focus on the Hedley Environmental Index Dashboard provided by the University of Hong Kong. The determinants that constitute its success are described as follows,

Data: The dashboard system collects data from surveillance stations in real time and provides updates daily. This makes sure that the data is of high-quality,…[Read more]

I have not worked with a DSS before but I have experienced how it works during treatment. I personally have a drug allergy that is recorded in my EMR. So everytime I go to receieve chemotherapy, the health monitor reads my EMR and would immediately show a big red warning that I have a drug allergy. I think the system is quite useful as it is very…[Read more]

As people above have mentioned, I think the main problem lies with standardization. The ICD helps provide a coding standard in documenting diseases, such that different healthcare providers or peripheral stakeholders such as researchers and insurers could have a consensus of coding in referring to the same disease. If the ICD is not used, there…[Read more]

I am slightly surprised about this finding. I think it is important what we compare it to. Before adopting the EMR, healthcare workers still have to document everything on paper, which is even more time consuming, writing things down and sorting through paper files. I think by standardizing some of the input fields, EMR already helped save time…[Read more]

While the boundaries that define eHealth are blurry and there could be many interpretations and overlaps for its definition, I think my definition would be ‘the use of information technology to enhance health outcomes.’ This is a definition that is easy to understand and overarching enough to cover all kinds of work that is in the field of…[Read more]

An easy example I could think of would be Youtube Videos.

5Vs characteristics (Volume, Velocity, Variety, Veracity, and Value)
Volume: The volume of Youtube videos are enormous. 3.7 million videos are uploaded every day with 200,000+ hours of content.

Velocity: Since videos are constantly being uploaded, viewed, and shared in real-time with…[Read more]

1. Have you ever observed a health informatics project in your (other) organization? Please provide a brief introduction.
The Hong Kong Government has launched a health informatics project known as the Electronic Health Record Sharing System (eHealth) to provide an electronic platform that aims to build free and lifelong electronic health records…[Read more]

I think the advantages are very clear in terms of costs and resources. Since it was given that the hospital does not has an existing system architecture of servers nor the IT staff with expertise, it would have to spend an unimaginable amount of budget to buy all the new servers to host the app and also to hire a big IT team with expertise to…[Read more]

I have personal experience with three kinds of attacks

First is the DDoS attack, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service. For this attack, the attacker usually has control of a “zombie network” of computers, which he could control to send a huge amount of requests to the target, flooding the traffic and thus making the target network no…[Read more]

In Hong Kong, a contact tracing app was launched known as “LeaveHomeSafe”. All citizens are required to scan QR codes when entering public spaces such as malls, restaurants, and government facilities. Anyone found not using the app could be fined. The purpose of the app was to trace everyone that had been at the same location with a potential COV…[Read more]

I did my undergraduate degree in global health, where I was taught about the essentials of management, governance, and policy setting, and I frequently had to research the comparative health policies of different countries. I also did my second major in linguistics where I developed some deep learning language models. So it would appear that I…[Read more]