Dr. Diana Atwine the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health has urged stakeholders in the health sector to integrate and embrace digitalization as this will help in achieving their main objectives of efficiency and cost effectiveness.
According to Dr Atwine, effective planning and budgeting can only be possible if you have quality data as this helps to know the exact disease burden in a household, community and region hence adequate planning.
“When we go digital, information will be accessed in every part of the country at any time for performance assessment and decision making, hence demonstrating the health quality in the country and that’s efficiency” Atwine highlighted.
She further noted that the Health Ministry is actively implementing electronic medical records systems both at health facilities and community levels and lately there are various electronic record systems enrolled at regional and referral hospitals.
“Our dream is to digitize medical record systems in greater Kampala and the metropolitan area because they have the worst indicators and reporting systems yet they have the biggest bulk of service providers” Dr Atwine further added.
Dr Atwine made these remarks at the launch of the Uganda Health Information and Digital Health Strategic Plan (HIDH) in Kampala on Monday.
The HIDH is a 5 year strategic plan from 2020/21-2024/25 that is aimed at providing commitments and priorities for the health information and digital health area of work.
The plan will also support effective use of content in the Health information system, such as predicting adverse health events which will help in planning health resources required for prevention and appropriate treatment of Ugandans.
The strategy further provides guidance on how the health information and digital health priority interventions will be implemented under the Ministry of Health strategic plan of 2021/21-2024/25.
At this launch, the Permanent Secretary re echoed her declaration that effective June 30th, they’re to switch them off all HIV and Lab systems that aren’t integrated into their systems.
Effective planning and budgeting, she said can be possible only with reliable data.
