Five guiding principles of eHealth System
The design and operation of the eHealth system has incorporated the following core concepts and principles –
- Patient-centric care: eHealth aims to build a life-long, comprehensive and individualised eHR profile for each and every participating patient, capturing essential health data that is readily available and easily accessible by the patient in need and his/her HCPs to support the delivery of patient-centric care.
- Voluntary participation: a patient can freely choose to participate in eHealth by giving express and informed consent to have his/her eHRs shared with private HCPs of his/her choice; and can revoke the consent at any time. Similarly, only HCPs who participate in and comply with the requirements for eHR sharing can deposit and access eHR data.
- Pre-defined sharable scope: only data falling within the pre-defined eHR scope can be shared through the eHealth platform; individual HCPs also may view patients’ eHRs only with their authorisation for the provision of healthcare services.
- "Patient-under-care" and "need-to-know": only HCPs providing healthcare services to a patient and with the need to know his/her health data for such purpose may access the patient’s health data with his/her consent and knowledge; and the patient may choose to give a one-year or indefinite access right to individual HCPs.
- Data privacy and system security: ensuring data privacy and system security is of paramount importance. Therefore, we have put in place a number of protection measures, including predefined access rights of different levels set in accordance with individual HCProfs’ clinical needs or roles, issuance of access notification to patients, etc. Privacy Impact Assessments and Security Risk Assessments and Audits are also conducted by the Government routinely.