[kictanet] Of Vision 2030 and Misplaced Priorities

[John Gachagua]

ICT gurus have one thing in common find the problem, define
it, troubleshoot, find a temporary work around, a solution, document the
solution and Proactive Maintenance. These are key traits to be injected to
other sectors like Health. The Kenya ICT board members are way ahead in terms
of ICT.
 It never surprised me
one day when a nurse of a prominent hospital in western Kenya wanted an
emergency leave to go out of the country due to an emergency, what followed was
a lot of bureaucracy, use of faxes and handwritten letters and physical delivery
of the letters in person to the parties involved, who are in different
districts, as the post office would take 3 days, At the end of the day She was
granted but she left red flags escalating way up to the PS of health. On the
ground Use of Emails and Internet is still a big challenge, where IT is
embraced you have to print and sent through post no Emails.
 We need doctors and
other Medical Practitioners to appreciate tools like WebMD, and other online tools. 
The best way to approach the health sector is ensure we have
a robust Health management system or ERP. The deployment of this system should
be a joint mission by the ministry of health, ministry of ICT and other
ministries that might be related.  What is
on the ground is Hospitals are allocated money for ICT compliancy and they
tender, Money minded Briefcase Companies win, do a substandard job, leaving the
hospital with a working ICT infrastructure that is crippled, Not done to
standard with bottlenecked Internet speeds, Intranets.
 The best is
deployment of standardized ICT hardware and Networking in 1st Phase
across major hospitals and Evaluation of Systems already deployed. The second
Phase, the Deployment of a Standard Hospital Management Systems or ERP solution
on the already standardized Infrastructure. The third phase is the going live
of the systems on the given hospitals and internetworking of all the hospitals.
A data center will be required in good time but those provisions are already
provided for by the GDC and the future GDC.
With regard to the above, Deployment of M-Health should be
done after, PS Ndemo Should wear the surgeons gloves and dissect the health
sector with ICT blades, Introduce HEALTH ERP systems, like Medinous and others.
The key features of the software system of the hospitals should  be Registration, Patient Check In / Check Out,
Laboratory / Pathology Automation, Inventory System, Food Department
Automation, Medicine, Patient Record Maintenance, Staff Record Maintenance, Staff
Payroll System, Doctor Consultant, Laundry Maintenance System, Emergency
Services, Operation Room / ICU Maintenance, In-house Mailing System, Blood Bank
Maintenance System, Database of Blood Donors / Blood Group, Billing System, Communication
of different Group Hospitals through Internet, News forum for flashing news, articles
and important meetings, Infrastructure Maintenance, Medical Equipment
Maintenance, Integration of various disciplines, Web Sites for the Hospitals
& its Features.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.kictanet.or.ke/pipermail/kictanet/attachments/20110606/f8c8efdf/attachment.htm>