A shifting government structure, power outages, and even the threat of crocodiles didn’t deter the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH) www.go2.tech.org from implementing KenyaEMR system at more than 340 clinics and district hospitals across Kenya.
The rollouts were supported by HRSA www.hrsa.gov and CDC www.cdc.gov through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). When PEPFAR’s care and treatment partners in Kenya identified the lack of timely and complete patient data as a major barrier to effective HIV/AIDS patient management, I-TECH and partners, designed and developed the KenyaEMR by expanding on the OpenMRS platform.
KenyaEMR a customized system was designed and developed in 2012 in collaboration with the Kenyan Ministry of Health www.health.go.ke. The pre-implementation phase engaged stakeholders and technical working groups working as a team.
It was important for I-TECH to conduct sensitization meetings with county, hospital, and facility administrators to make them aware of the benefits of the EMR system and to obtain their support.
The team purchased hardware, installed intranets, and set up and deployed software. This phase also included conducting on the job training and having mentors train more Health Managers who were then able to train the staff at local facilities. To date, I-TECH has oriented 625 Health Managers and trained 1,409 system users and mentors.
Post implementation, I-TECH is providing ongoing software maintenance, system support, and guidance on using patient monitoring. I-TECH is also working to expand handling pharmacy and laboratory orders plus some other functions as well.
Today, physicians and other health workers are able to see a summarized profile before meeting with a patient. Also, using an electronic database has enabled various stakeholders in Kenya to collect public health data to assist in making broad reaching policy decisions.