Welcome to the Asia Pacific Electronic Health Record Conference!

A nationwide EHR sharing platform to enable total interoperability of EMR systems have been a dream for most modern countries and cities. Hong Kong has been privileged to have an unique start by networking all 40 public hospitals and 120 public clinics since 1992, with the same clinical terminologies and data standards, and in fact, with the same EMR system throughout the public sectors. Citiizens and healthcare workers have enjoyed fully interoperability within the public sector since the year 2000, when our ePR was born and mature.

Since 2007 we even go further by piloting unidirectional sharing of public patient data securely to private sector upon patient consent and security measures (the PPI-ePR pilot project). And we are glad to see more than half a million citizens enjoying this benefit since 2007.

The Government of the Hong Kong SAR has decided in 2008 to go a step further to a bidirectional private-public sharing of data and set aside more than 700 milllion HK dollars for this purpose. We are glad that after struggling for several years, with solid foundation and ground works in standardization, privacy protection and legal framework, the territory wide EHR sharing system Bill was passed in July 2015, and put into live action in March 2016.

This Conference comes in a good time to commemorate on this achievement. On behalf of the 3 most active eHealth organizations in Hong Kong, namely the HL7 Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Society of Medical Informatics and the eHealth Consortium, we proudly present to you this very special conference with the theme of "Smart Connected Healthcare".

This will be a very good occasion and prime arena for all international and local experts in the field of Electronic Health Records in the world to share their experience and challenges they have faced. At the same time, the Greater China eHealth Forum will be held concurrently to continue to enhance the eHealth Development in the Greater China region.

Please give us support, and join us in this meaningful event.

Dr. CP Wong
Chairman
Organising Committee