Circular 13/2025 makes electronic medical records mandatory for hospitals in Vietnam, with a deadline of 30 September 2025. This is a dated legal obligation, not a recommendation, and meeting it is the floor rather than the finish line.
The circular requires hospitals to move off paper and run electronic medical records as the primary record of care. The patient chart lives in a system, follows defined data standards, and can be shared and audited rather than sitting in a folder on a shelf. Records become structured, consistent, and available across the care team. The deadline gives that intent a date: by 30 September 2025, hospitals are expected to have made the switch.
Two thirds are electronic, and the chart still does not travel
Adoption is well underway. By late 2025, more than 1,100 of about 1,650 hospitals and treatment facilities had moved to electronic records, close to two thirds, according to Vietnam News reporting.
The harder problem now is interoperability. A record that is electronic inside one hospital still does not travel cleanly to the next. A patient's history fragments at the door.
Compliant is the starting line
It is tempting to read the mandate as a project with an end. Stand up an electronic medical record, pass the check, done. That framing undersells what the change makes possible and oversells what it solves.
A compliant electronic record digitizes the chart. It does not, on its own, make the chart easier to read, safer to prescribe against, or faster to search. A chart that was fragmented on paper is, by default, a chart that is fragmented on a screen. The information is now electronic. Whether it is usable is a separate question.
So the honest reading is narrower. The mandate is the moment the data becomes structured and accessible enough that clinical intelligence can finally do something useful with it. The electronic record is the foundation. What you build on it is where the value lives. That layer has a name, a clinical decision support system, and from 2026 it answers to Vietnam's new AI law as well as the record mandate.
What the electronic record makes possible
Start with the chart itself. Once records are electronic and structured, a layer that works beside the doctor can read what is already there and give time back. A fragmented chart becomes a clean, structured summary, so a clinician reads the case instead of reassembling it. Scattered entries resolve into one searchable timeline instead of a stack of disconnected notes.
The same structure changes how orders are checked. Decision support can screen a prescription in real time for interactions and contraindications, before it is signed rather than after. It can ground each recommendation in clinical guidelines and put a source on every answer the clinician can open and check.
None of this works while the record is paper. All of it depends on the record being electronic first. That is why the mandate matters past compliance. It is the precondition for the rest.
Plan for what stands on top
Meeting Circular 13 is non-negotiable and time-bound. A hospital that treats it only as a box to tick ends up with a digital filing cabinet. A hospital that treats it as the foundation for clinical intelligence ends up with records that actively help clinicians work.
The deadline is the floor. The question worth answering now is what stands on top of it.