State closes in on e-health

In what might see improvement in quality and efficiency in disease surveillance, the ministry linked first of its five data centres to national laboratories, writes FREDRICK OBURA

The recent launch of a medical information centre by the Ministry of Health, Clinton Health Initiative (CHAI) and Hewlett Packard (HP) in Nairobi could herald a new era in sharing, accessing, and retrieval of patient information among hospitals.

In what might see improvement in quality and efficiency in disease surveillance, the ministry has established first of its five data centres (central information nerve) to be linked to four of the ministry’s laboratories to fast-track diagnosis.

Each data centre will include the computing and storage power to connect more than 1,500 health facilities and 20,000 healthcare workers.

Ministry of Health PS Mark Bor says the laboratory makes testing for diseases such as HIV quick and simple.

"The project will improve testing and treatment for more than 120,000 infants exposed to HIV Aids each year in the country," he says

The blood sample from various patients taken will now get a bar code, and once it’s tested, the results are recorded in a database created by software developers from the Kenya’s Strathmore University.

"So, instead of waiting for results to arrive by courier, doctors will be able to receive results via a text message sent to SMS/GSM-enabled printers located throughout rural areas," he added.

"We are targeting to improve our service delivery and makedisease diagnosis a simple process," he said.

"These and other technology projects in the pipeline would enable us achieve the objective."

The Managing Director HP East Africa Ken Mbwaya said the launch of the data centre was a significant step towards modernising functions in the sector in a bid to make better disease management and alleviate barriers that frustrate developmental efforts.

ICT infrastructure

"The data centre will facilitate provision of life-saving care to infants accelerating access to life-saving technologies and help government build the capacity required for high-quality care and treatment programs," he said.

The data centre is to host manual processes including the District Health Information System (DHIS) which allows the government to evaluate the performance of the public health system on issues such as vaccination coverage and mortality under five among other millennium developmental goals as they relate to health.

Others include Human Resources Information System-HRIS, Electronic Medical Records-EMRS, and the Health Sector Commodity Management among others.

Disaster Recovery

The data centre will also be a Disaster Recovery installation for other key installations within the Ministries of Health as well as other departments/ministries of government.

"At the moment, it houses key routing infrastructure for the country’s integrated finance management information systems, which is run by the Ministry of Finance," he said.

HP will upgrade the centre to allow connectivity to all types of networks, internal and external, and provide for separate storage from the servers and that supports the other existing servers, as well as Tape back up systems to allow for automated backups.

Information and Communication PS Bitange Ndemo noted that e-health is picking up in Kenya with the availability of faster Internet and mobile phones in the country.

"It has enabled firms such as Safaricom, Orange, Cisco, Changamka Micro-health Ltd to roll out e-health initiatives."

The Changamka health initiative for instance aims at saving lives of over 7,000 women dying annually in the delivery process.

Through a partnership with Pumwani Maternity Hospital, the initiative helps mothers in low-income areas who have no access to medical schemes and insurance save money on the Changamka Smart Card.

"This data centre is unprecedented in the history of the Health Ministry and represents the biggest investment in IT to date," he said.

Speaking last year at the Aitec organised e-health summit in Nairobi, health experts drawn from different parts of the world said without commitment from the government, emerging health innovations might not benefit Kenyans.

"Without policies and strategies, it is very difficult to make sense of the inroads that technology is making into the health sector," said Prof Yunkap Kwankam, Chief Executive Officer Global eHealth Consultants.

"ICT is coming into the health sector with or without policies and strategies and the health strategies would make e-health have impact and contribute immensely to the betterment of health in the country," he said.

He asked the government to develop legal policies to protect digitised health records from confidentiality risks.

Scale up

Kwankam also asked the government to scale up access policies to improve penetration of infrastructure such as Internet, computers, mobile phones currently targeted by various e-health programs

"We also need the state to accept digital signatures, it is crucial for validation of electronic health records to be shared among doctors."