AUTOMATE | HEALTH | SERVICES 

KAMPALA - Health services in the district general hospitals and some Health Centre IVs are to be automated.

The deliberate direction to automate health services, according to the health ministry is already being plotted in 10 Regional Referral Hospitals.

The health ministry spokesperson, Emmanuel Ainebyona, said an Integrated Health Management Information System (IHMIS) has already been rolled out at Gulu, Hoima, Fort Portal, Moroto, Soroti, Mbarara, Kabale, Masaka, and Naguru China-Uganda Friendship Hospital.

“The system is being piloted in the number of regional referral hospitals and we intend to expand to other levels of public health facilities,” Ainebyona said.

The IHMIS is born out of a government initiative, the Integrated Intelligent Computer Systems (IICS), which started as a research project in 2010 under the supervision of the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology.

IICS charged with engineering software systems to support the health sector has since helped to develop and design operational modalities of the hospital monitoring system.

Dr. Silver Kiyimba, the IICS technologies principal investigator and the team leader said the roll-out to the 66 health facilities will be done this financial year.

“At the end of the field refresher training, the ten hospitals will have achieved significant strides and consequently will go paperless as an immediate result,” he said.

Flagging off a team of 22 ICT scientists to conduct both fresh and refresher training on a few changes in the IHMIS in different hospitals across the country at IICS secretariat in Muyenga in Kampala, Kiyimba said government approved the deployment of the system which is controlled at government data centre at NITA-U, as a means to increase efficiency in public hospitals and health centres to make it possible for government to cut unnecessary health expenditures.

“This was mainly realised from unmeasured supply of medicine resulting sometimes into wastage because of expiration.

It on the other hand saves the hospital administration from under requesting for medicine as the system automatically sends an alert based on the previous requests and usage,” he said.

Under the system, Kiyimba said that health workers are given computers with internet services adding that it cannot be tampered with at the facility level since it is centrally controlled.

Kiyimba added that it is designed to addresses absenteeism of health workers, theft of drugs, patient record management, among others.

To deal with absenteeism, Kiyimba revealed that they have developed a computer module that handles the attendance of health workers and their performance.

“We don’t stop at acknowledging the attendance of a health worker, but the system goes further to monitor them during their working hours.

For example, when a clinician reports at a health facility, the system gets to know the time of reporting and also waits for the health workers to start working on the patient.”

The system, Kiyimba said logs in every patient the health worker sees, the time spent on the patient and monitors the entire process.

“When a patient comes in, is registered and details captured, using the system, a patient is forwarded to another point of delivery, so we record the complaint of the patient and diagnosis then the system forwards it to the pharmacy.

And in case of appointment, it is made and scheduled by the system,” he said.

He said in the pharmacy, the system among others helps the pharmacist to pre-pack medicine frequently dispensed, directs him or her to shelves where each drug is stored and recommends a particular batch number for him to issue to patients.

It also helps pharmacists to calculate the dosage and it is recorded in the system. The system according to Kiyimba also enables health facilities to order and receive drugs from National Medical stores.

It also helps to aggregate the disease burden on a daily basis.