The Sunday News
Sunday News Reporter
THE Ministry of Health and Child Care is in the process of rolling out an electronic system to monitor TB and HIV patients in a bid to increase efficiency in management of patients.
The new system, dubbed Zimbabwe Electronic Patient Monitoring System (ZIMePMS), will also help reduce the paper trail and enable health workers to perform their duties more effectively.
Deputy national ART coordinator (Aids and TB Programmes) in the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Dr Regis Choto told Sunday News that the system will be rolled out to 534 health facilities countrywide.
The system funded to the tune of $2,5 million by the Global Fund, is already operational in 350 health facilities, with the remaining hospitals expected to start using the system before the end of this year.
He said the 534 selected health facilities were high volume antiretroviral therapy (ART) sites catering for over 80 percent of all TB and HIV patients in the country.
“We started piloting this programme in 2014 at 83 sites before scaling up to 350 in 2015 and we expect to cover the remaining sites this year to give us a total of 534 sites.
“The selection of the sites was very strategic. We had to look at the high volume sites and the 534 selected sites constitute 80 percent of our patients,” he said.
Dr Choto said the new system will be integrated with the already existing District Health Information System (DHIS) to increase efficiency in capturing patient information.
He said the system will be introduced at different levels for central hospitals and provincial hospitals to reduce the burden of manually recording patient data.
“With the manual system we were using, the data clerk or nurse has to fill up to 23 registers for one individual. This involves a lot of paper-work. That is why our storage facilities are full to the brim with files and registers.
“This labour-intensive task is now being reduced to one paper trail through the use of the mandatory booklet. The rest is done electronically in real time through ePMs” said Dr Choto.
He added that the electronic patient monitoring will also help provide policy makers with more reliable data on patients, including those on long-term treatment.
“The system will improve forecasting and quantification for commodities since health officials will now have more reliable data on people undergoing treatment,” said Dr Choto.
“The system is automated and by a click of button you can access patient information. Confidentiality is also guaranteed as we have designed the system in such a manner that information cannot be leaked. One health facility cannot know what is happening with a patient at another hospital,” he said.
Added Dr Choto: “The system is also very ideal for electronic calculations, analysis, patient information consolidation as well as providing information on early warning indicators and the rate of patient survival.
“If a hospital at provincial or district level cannot locate their patient they can communicate with the national office who can tell them where their patient would have moved to in the event that patient would have relocated and is receiving treatment at another health facility.”
Dr Choto said four nurses, one pharmacist, a matron and health information officers from the selected facility, district and province have been trained on the new software.
He said data entry clerks have also been recruited with the help of the Global Fund, who will work in capturing patient data at health facilities.
