The revelations to go electronic were made by Richard Gakuba, coordinator of e-health for the Ministry of Health, on Monday during an e-health conference at the Chez Lando Hotel in Kigali.
“The advantage of having an electronic medical record is that when you move from one facility to another your past medical history can be easily tracked allowing health care providers to provide better care to patients,” Gakuba said, in an interview during the opening day of the Rwanda Health Information Exchange workshop.
“The information kept on your electronic medical record is critical to the doctor when they are treating you because it provides a detailed history of your health that they would otherwise never know.”
Fully implementing a national electronic health registry is expected to be completed in stages over the next three years, according to Gakuba, however, he said the timeframe depends on the construction of additional infrastructure projects such as electricity and network connectivity.
“Electronic records will save paper and time, but more importantly it will save lives,” he said.
For each health care centre to run a fully functional electronic medical record system it typically costs six million Rwanda francs, Gakuba said, but stressed that the full cost of implementing the program is difficult to estimate at this point.
During the workshop, many people raised issues and concerns about the security of people’s information.
“I think sometimes people think that when something becomes electronic it becomes insure, but I think it’s the other way around, because there are so many ways of authenticating access to this kind of information, so I don’t think anyone should worry about their medical record being insecure.”
The workshop is sponsored by Jembi Health Systems, a non-profit company based in South Africa that specializes in health information systems. The company has been working with the Ministry of Health for the past three years to create and implement a national electronic healthcare registry.
“We predominantly work with health ministries on their national e-health strategic plan, or if they don’t have one we try and help them develop one,” said Chris Seebregts, the executive director of Jembi Health Systems.
“We then work with international donors to identify projects that would be useful in a country, and help with the development and implementation of those projects,” he said, adding that his company has successfully worked with Mozambique to implement a mortality system to better understand the country’s leading causes of death.
In October the government will be hosting an e-health open day to bring together public and private stakeholders to better understand the potential business opportunities in the healthcare sector. A date has not yet been set, but it is expected to take place later in October.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Paul Clarke
Quelle/Source: Rwanda News Agency, 24.09.2012
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