07 Sep 2016

Director of Health Informatics in the Ministry of Health, Dr Kabelo Mokgacha says the ministry will launch a patient portal next year. 

Speaking during the Afri health informatics panel session at the ongoing 6^th African International Association of Science and Technology for Development (IASTED) conference, Dr Mokgacha said through the patient portal, patients will be able to access all their health records, interact and communicate with their doctors and other health care providers. He said Botswana’s Internet connectivity is improving and will help a lot in patient management.

Dr Mokgacha said Botswana has made strides in as far as health informatics are involved, being the first country in Sub Saharan Africa to roll out the electronic health system to all public hospitals.  “We have managed to convert our medical cards through this system popularly known as the integrated patient management system (IPMS) into an electronic format,” he said.

“As I speak to you now we have a total of about 28 hospitals out of which 27 of them now are running on these IPMS, all our laboratories now are soft, gone are those days when we used to have papers moving from the doctor, having a middle man going to the labs carrying specimen and then having someone at 4pm to check the results, we now have the capacity to have all our results online on the government data network.”

Furthermore Mokgacha said Botswana in 2007 took another step to come up with the Maitlamo document which contains in it pillars which will help drive the country towards Vision 2016. These include e-commerce, e-health, e-education which provides computer literacy and other e-learning materials and strategies at a very young age that will at a later stage form a very important population that is digitally aware. 

He said the ministry is now having a strategy in place to try to build capacity to now have all results on data online.

For his part founder and president of Boitekanelo group and one of the panelists Dr  Tiroyaone Mampane said they have revised curriculum at Boitekanelo College so that all learners will take up health informatics as a module so that by the time they graduate they will be familiar with the programme. 

“We also introduced a specific programme to train medical records personnel on health informatics at certificate and diploma level so that they can assist doctors and nurses in terms of putting data and accuracy. 

In terms of the future of health informatics in Botswana I strongly believe that we have a strong future and I believe that our government and the private sector institutions are very much aware of the Maitlamo project and are all trying to abide and promote health informatics in Botswana,” Dr Mampane said.

Dr Mampane continued saying three years ago Boitekanelo group did a research survey whose primary objective was to try to evaluate the readiness of the adoption of the IPMS system ,to find out why IPMS is not fully utilised in Botswana yet the government has spent so much on it and they approached about 15 hospitals and one of the key factors that came up was that doctors and nurses did not  have the time to be able to input on it as they are short staffed and some of the elderly practitioners were not very comfortable with the computer and felt it wasted their time.  They came up with recommendations that the government should come up with some medical clerks who will be responsible for putting data there.

Another panelist, Mr Ryan Littman Quinn who is  of Botswana Upenn Health Informatics Capacity Building Programme said when he arrived in Botswana in 2010 training institutions had very basic IT curriculum where everything was pushed into IT but there was nothing about general concepts on health informatics, they started doing sensitization awareness to make people aware through health awareness pitsos, health innovation competitions to expose people to Health Informatics. They also did an in service and pre service course where they trained UB medical students on informatics.

“The greatest thing that we did was to spot some Batswana who were interested in health informatics for post graduate degrees and our first graduate class for capacity building graduates is next year from Botho University,” Mr Ryan said. ENDS