The dream of every patient in Lebanon … “Because the shower is painful”!

Centia Sarkis MTV

In a country that was ever known as “East Hospital”, the Lebanese people today live in daily suffering in order to obtain their primary right to health care. Since the outbreak of successive crises, economic, political, and financial, the medical sector in Lebanon has declined dramatically, becoming one of the most prominent aspects of general collapse, leaving the citizens wrestling with pain and anxiety at the same time.

Hospitals that have always been a pride for the Lebanese, have become a lot of dream in Lebanon who left the economic crisis immune to their most basic rights, and in the forefront of the right to obtain a medicine, so that the cost of simple surgery may reach the equivalent of a full year salary for a family of middle class. However, another suffering joins its predecessors, which is the chaos inherent in this sector. At a time when countries are racing towards digital transformation and relying on electronic health records, Lebanon is still steeped in the chaos of medical papers, in a painful form that reflects the depth of the crisis in a sector that suffers from chronic flabby and severe shortage in modernity and organization.

In Lebanese hospitals and health centers, it is rare to find a unified system for preserving medical files. How many medical examinations repeat the patient because he lost its result, and how many drugs that were dispensed to the patient contradicts what he considers mainly due to the doctor’s inability to see the full medical file?

Unfortunately, there is no unified system in Lebanon in Lebanon that links government and private hospitals, not even between clinics and laboratories. Every center works “in his own way”, which makes the patient move between doctors or hospitals, a stressful journey from handing the files manually, photographing radiology, and collecting analyzes, at a time when all this information is supposed to be available with a button.

Imagine that you are in a doctor’s clinic you visit the first time, and that you will not need to be informed of all your health problems and what you have experienced for years, and all the treatments or surgeries that you underwent, or the medications that you took and whether you have an allergy to some types of them. Imagine that it will enter a button to your private medical file, and look at your full health history without the need for any additional details from you … How much for this matter is to shorten time, correct the work of the medical sector, and improve the quality of health care, as it will definitely reduce errors in this field as the interference of inappropriate drugs together, for example.

Add to the foregoing that the electronic medical records would provide time and cost, as the need to search for paper files will exceed, as well as the exchange of information quickly between health centers, which enables the doctor to review the patient’s condition in emergency cases even if he is outside the hospital. Among his many advantages is that he mentions the doctor and the patient at the same time of the necessary periodic checks and vaccines.

However, entering this technology without some difficulties in Lebanon, especially with the many economic and social challenges that have been under the country for years, such as the need to ensure the protection of patients’ privacy and secure data from penetration, with the need to train medical crews on the use of systems, without forgetting, of course, the high costs of establishing and maintaining the electronic system.

In some countries, such as Singapore, Canada, the United States, Australia, Estonia, Finland, and Denmark, these records have become a basic standard, but in the Arab countries, there are advanced steps that started in the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, while Lebanon is still relatively far from it … Perhaps the new era that lights light at the end of the tunnel in which we are stuck for years … makes us dream of a lot, including the electronic health registry, the health is not. Welfare, but the right, and the organization of the health sector in Lebanon must be a priority, because “Al -Badla is more painful”.