Press Release 17 May 2007 The Hong Kong Medical Association TaoYuan Project

Modern information technology (IT) can greatly enhance the quality of medical care. It will greatly facilitate information exchange and will help reduce errors. To help bring modern IT to the private medical sector, the Hong Kong Medical Association and the Information Software Industry Association have started a project to produce and promulgate clinic software to be distributed for use by doctors in Hong Kong. The project was code-named “TaoYuan Project” and it was started on 9 May 2007. It will be completed in July 2009.

The software produced will be an open source one and the source code will be released to the users. It will be distributed free to medical practitioners in Hong Kong. Using the open source code, the users will be able to improve and expand its function to meet their future need. The system will use the common information standards agreed by the medical and IT profession. This will allow the new software to be expanded to enable medical information exchange between the private doctors and the public hospitals. It would also facilitate infectious disease reporting to the Department of Health.

The software will be able to run on multiple computer systems like the Windows system, the Linux system, the Mac System and the Unix system. Unix is mainly used by mainframe computers in hospitals and other institutes.

Apart from development of the software, there will also be IT courses for the doctors to get familiar with the system and other aspects of IT. This project was funded by a grant of HK$999,580 from the OGCIO (Office of the Chief Government Information Officer). The Hong Kong Medical Association will also be contributing HK$258,000 in the project.

17 May 2007

Notes to editors:
The Hong Kong Medical Association, founded in 1920, aims to bring together Hong Kong's government, institutional, university and private medical practitioners for an effective exchange of views and co-ordination of efforts. The foremost objective of the Association is to safeguard and promote public health. The Association speaks collectively for its members and aims to keep its members abreast of medical ethics, issues and advances around the world. In fulfilling these goals, the association hopes to better serve the people of Hong Kong.

Back to Previous Page