The Healthcare System in Saudi Arabia and its Challenges: The Case of Diabetes Care Pathway

Abstract

The advances of Information Technology (IT) play an important role globally in improving quality and capacity of healthcare sector. IT helps the health professions in managing resources and increasing productivity effectively. Although the conversion from paper to electronic patient records (EPR) conveys many benefits for both caregivers and caretakers, but also has brought many challenges in different aspects. Hospitals have implemented EPR to different degrees. They have used a set of standards in order to insure that data is accurately and consistently processed. Even though, the standardization of how data are captured, exchanged and used includes a set of complications that should be discovered to provide better health data quality for patients with multiple healthcare providers. Therefore, through an analysis of the EPR systems utilization in Saudi Arabia and the diabetes care pathway, three factors have been determined. These factors affect the workflow of the implementation and utilization of health information system (HIS) in terms of capturing, sharing and using its data efficiently.