Digitisation of Clinical Information in the Health Sector-impediments and Solutions-an overview

The commercial world of health sector hopes to capture the promised efficiencies of the knowledge management inorder to gain competitive market advantage. The knowledge management is a tremendous asset and a unique advantage as this provides the organization with valuable, credible and insightful information about the explicit and tacit information at all levels. So, hospitals are involved in knowledge management by generating databases, links to website and portals for integrating explicit and tacit information. Thus the health sector is faced with challenge of massive cataloging of information and preservation. Digitization of clinical data in the health care sector has been so far quite resisted despite all obvious advantages and is still stubbornly clinging to paper files for storing clinical records. This is mainly because of both systemic and behavioral pitfalls that are faced by the health sector. This paper offers an overview to the impediments to digitization of health care information and suggests a few solutions towards the creation of a digitised clinical record system. Replication of the ease and familiarity of a paper record into a computer based digital record satisfying all the diverse criteria is a massive challenge often requiring custom made solutions.