[kictanet] 2-Day eHealth Workshop closes with a suprise

[John Walubengo]

Last week on Wed 21st/Thrs 22nd, I had the opportunity to
attend the above regional (East African) meeting on eHealth
at the Nairobi Safari Club. Member states (Ke, Ug, Tz, Rw,
& Burundi) were showcasing their eHealth projects and
sharing experiences.

As usual, Rwanda's experience was way ahead of the pack. 
The chaps are pretty focused and have established eHealth
Task forces that have been on the ground for over five
years.  The have a comprehensive (Vision, Mission,
Objective, Activities, etc) eHealth Strategy that is well
integrated into their National Health Plan (Solved their
Budget/Funding Wars that way).

Amongst some of the acitivities they have implemented was
to link up their three National Referral Hospitals with
fiber and are running Telemedicine & Other applications
such as: Doctor-to-Doctor Consultations, Doctor-to-patient
consultations(e.g. sharing digitized X-rays), Drug
Inventory Control & Monitoring, Blood Bank Control &
Monitoring, Epidemic Surveillance amongst others.  

They are currently looking forward to mapping their Health
Information Systems (HIMS) onto a Geographical Information
Systems (GIS) in order to extract 'Health-Intelligence'
from their data.  For example, using the two systems, they
would be able to 'see' why consumption of Malaria drugs is
higher in some locations as compared to the other -
probably due to the surrounding swampy conditions.  This
would get their Health managers to intervene by way of
treating the swampy conditions rather than just increasing
the stock levels of Malaria drugs for that region. {I think
that is clever}

It always beats me:- How comes we are having to learn from
Rwanda every now and then and yet we are supposedly the
'big brother'?

walu.












 
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