Almost a year after completing its EMR rollout, publicly-listed healthcare group EMC Healthcare in Indonesia is set to upgrade to an AI-driven system for managing health records.
EMC Healthcare – the brand name of Sarana Meditama Metropolitan – runs eight hospitals that offer basic and specialist health services.
According to a media release, the healthcare provider is adopting a “reimagined EHR” system, which features automated documentation through ambient audio recording, prepopulated follow-up actions for clinician review, and AI-assisted coding. Its vendor, InterSystems, said the hospital is the first in the Asia-Pacific region to preview and test the generative AI-driven system.
Implementing EMR
The healthcare company expanded its group by acquiring hospitals. Initially, these hospitals operated different health information systems independently. These systems, mainly paper-based, caused challenges to clinicians and staff, including storage issues, accessibility limitations, risk of loss and damage, difficulty in sharing information, lack of standardisation, no audit trails, and limited data analysis capabilities.
To address these issues, the management proposed the hospital’s digitalisation, at the core of which is a single, centralised HIS.
“We started the EMR project in November 2021, when we signed the TrakCare EMR system implementation contract with InterSystems. Then, we started recruiting the implementor team, including superusers, training, collecting system requirements from all hospitals, configuring the system, and testing. The first site went live in December 2022. Then the next sites went live three months, or around one or two months apart after that. In June 2024, we completed the implementation of the TrakCare system in all eight hospitals,” Jusup Halimi, president director of EMC Healthcare, told Healthcare IT News.
Medical records were also digitised simultaneously, scanning more than one million pages.
Their biggest challenge, according to the hospital executive, was “to get buy-in from our specialist doctors, who are around 700.”
“Management convinced the doctors, and the superuser team trained the doctors to be able to use TrakCare. After going live, the superuser team [continued providing] assistance to the doctors so that they felt comfortable using it.”
Turning to AI
EMC Healthcare’s EMR journey did not stop there. Recently, it piloted an AI-driven EMR system from the same vendor. “AI is the future trend. If we don’t start using it, we will be left behind,” Halimi exclaimed.
The hospital president wanted to include AI-powered clinical decision support tools in the EMR system. These, he said, will provide predictive analytics for risk stratification, personalised treatment recommendations based on a broader range of patient data, and proactive alerts for potential complications, going beyond simple rule-based systems.
Following the AI system pilot, EMC Healthcare sees AI delivering the most value to its clinic consultation rooms, inpatient daily visits, and emergency department.
“AI can support doctors in accessing a comprehensive patient summary, something that traditionally required navigating across multiple charts and screens. This not only consumed time but also risked missing critical context,” Halimi noted.
“With AI, we can provide an intelligent patient overview that consolidates data from different sources into a single, structured summary, highlighting key clinical findings, observation trends, imaging reports, allergies, and recent diagnoses. This gives doctors a full picture of the patient’s condition at a glance, helping them make faster, safer, and more informed decisions.”
“AI can reduce the documentation burden through features like speech-to-text and smart charting. When doctors and patients have a conversation, the AI can transcribe the conversation and intelligently place the right information into the corresponding sections of the EMR, whether it’s the chief complaint, allergy, diagnosis, or plan. This allows doctors to maintain eye contact with their patients, rather than with a computer screen. The experience becomes more human.”
Jusup Halimi, President Director, EMC Healthcare
Harnessing data with AI
Currently, EMC Healthcare is using a data warehouse system to store patient, medical, clinical and financial data. Analytical tools are also used to display information. “We have a monthly performance review meeting per hospital, whose data is extracted using the tool so we can analyse the data deeply,” Halimi shared.
How does EMC Healthcare intend to harness data using an AI-driven EMR system? The hospital head says data and AI will be utilised to enhance clinical decision support, efficiency and workflow, as well as patient experience during hospitalisation, and for research purposes.
“We have a medical research committee that could be more active with the help of AI. For example, medical research using EMR data will be easier to do because the data is easier to obtain.”
Besides AI, an EMR system, Halimi emphasised, must have user-friendly interfaces that enhance clinical workflows “rather than disrupting them.” It must also be “designed with attention to user experience, seamlessly integrating into the daily routines of physicians and nurses, minimising clicks, and providing relevant information at the point of care without overwhelming the user.”