King Fahad Medical City signed a contract with EPIC, which is a step that would develop the provided health services and rely on the state-of-the-art technology to identify patient information at different healthcare stages, thereby ensuring the provision of accurate treatment plans in accordance with accurate and comprehensive data, to keep pace with current upgrade of health sector in the Kingdom, in order to meet the requirements of the National Transformation Program 2020 and Saudi Arabia's Vision for 2030.
KFMC stated, "EPIC system will be an effective way to deal with patients who come in large numbers to KFMC suffering various health problems. This requires an electronic system that records health information in the patient's file, including blood tests, radiology, pharmacy, and the medical history."
"EPIC system is characterized by several advantages, the most important of which is its adoption of international medical standards, which are important in raising quality of healthcare provided to patients. In addition, it supports transformation in health sector into the trend of going to patients at homes instead of waiting them to come to the hospital. This is done by EPIC's ability to study the patient's behavior and family history. EPIC can identify potential diseases and collect the information needed by medical team to start taking preventive measures and provide necessary awareness on how to live a healthy life, follow a healthy diet, exercise, and other information that cannot be applied by paper-based system, because it is based on collecting and analyzing information, and then taking the necessary action.
The application is an electronic system to record information, including patients referred to KFMC, or those who come directly to it, especially those suffering from advanced conditions and several health problems that require them to move within KFMC from one specialty to another.
EPIC is one of the best systems worldwide and has been implemented in Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, several international medical centers, John Hopkins Aramco Healthcare, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and the University of Beirut. KFMC is the second facility to implement EPIC in the Kingdom and it will be applied at a higher level than what is applied in Aramco due to the great number of beds, and variety of specialties and subspecialty in KFMC. Moreover, KFMC will be the starting point to circulate the experience in other centers within the Kingdom in the future".