Was there lack of record keeping culture or were the records maintained in paper format?
I think that it is partly culture. The doctors here keep a lot of information in their heads. Records, in Asia, are not seen as a very central part of transactions, but that has to change as medicine becomes more complex and treatments become more sophisticated. The doctors are now realising that they can not carry on like this for long and I already see a cultural change happening. What are the medico-legal issues involved in storing electronic medical records? When it comes to documentation, people working in the hospitals are not very aware of the legal situation. We, obviously, had to take guidance from the legal people in the health ministry and they came to the conclusion that although keeping records in books is a good idea, yet it is not legally binding to keep records in books. The records need to be maintained, whether you write them in books or type them into the computer, provided the user is identified, time of input is recorded and the records do not disappear. So there w
