CEO of Petroleum Industry Health Organization (PIHO) Mehdi Hashemi has said that the PIHO hospital in Tehran had become paperless due to the outbreak of the coronavirus.
He said that the decision had been taken in a bid to break the transmission chain of the coronavirus in the petroleum industry.
“This project is envisaged in three phases: eliminating paper prescriptions, eliminating test result papers and eliminating imaging report papers. After this scheme is conducted in the Tehran hospital of PIHO, the project would be implemented in other PIHO-run hospitals,” he added.
Hashemi said a major achievement of paperless system was to reduce unnecessary commutations and subsequently lower contamination in the hospital.
“By implementing this project, the pharmaceutical background, treatment background, tests and imaging become available, which would accelerate prescription of medications, particularly for chronic diseases, and access to imaging record, which would accelerate service providing and reduce medical errors,” he said.
“In designing this software, IT experts were involved and they tried tom make it user-friendly,” he added.
Hashemi said that IT, system development and feedback centers were in charge of implementing the paperless system.
The paperless system is part of a project for implementing an integrated system of information to manage all activities related to health, which would cover planning, supervision, coordination and decision-making.
In light of the high pace of technological progress in the world and the outbreak of medical crises like the coronavirus, this process has become more serious. That is important not only from a management standpoint, but from a clinical point of view.