Min. of Health goes hi-tech @ hospital
It has been in the works for the last eight years, and today officials of the Ministry of Health proudly unveiled their latest tool in the health sector reform process. It?s a million dollar computer software programme that will put vital information on every patient who seeks treatment at hospitals and clinics countrywide at the fingertips of doctors and medical practitioners. According to the Director of the Policy Analysis and Planning Unit Dr. Peter Allen, the Health Information System will collect and feed information between every community, village town and city in the country. The net effect of this kind of investment, he says will be overall improvement in the equity, access and quality of health care services to all Belizeans.
Dr. Peter Allen, Dir., Policy, Analysis and Planning Unit
?All people who need access to the health care, to information regarding the health of a patient will have access at various levels of security. Health information of course must be kept confidential, but aggregated health information without unique identifiers or confidential information will be available for instance to health planners; for them to see what is the disease profile of the country and of the area. How many diabetics, how many hypertensive, so that we can monitor any outbreaks of disease, malaria and dengue fever, so that we can respond to those outbreaks in an efficient manner.?
?What we?ve showed today is a demonstration of what?s installed and ready to run at Karl Heusner. This is the end of phase one. And phase two and phase three will take it to the rest of the country. And phase two and phase three–the time frame is about twelve months.?
Phase one of the project will initially run exclusively at the Karl Heusner Memorial hospital before being rolled out to the rest of the country. Dr. Allen says that Belize?s Health Information System, developed in collaboration with the Canadian company Accesstec, should be fully functional in all health facilities by July of next year.
Ian Smith, Information Specialist, M.O.H.
?It has been tested at Karl Heusner; it works; it is functioning properly. It could be used today as we speak at Karl Heusner. The reason why it has not been deployed is because the accounting module of the application is still being developed. That should be completed in six weeks time.?
?With the changes in technology, how assured can the Belizean people be that their records will be confidential??
?Oh it?s very, very secure; the technology, we are using state of the art. The expertise that is actually behind the design and the development of this application, they?re world class people; very intelligent. So the Belizean people should rest assured that their information will be held in a confidential system.?
And while health officials are positively upbeat about how the project will change health care delivery, one of the main concerns from the get go is how safe the database will be and what safeguards will be in place to ensure that there is no breach of the confidentiality of patients? medical history. Information Specialist with the Ministry of Health, Ian Smith, says protocols have been built into the programme to make sure that only those who need to know will have access to information.
The programme runs on the Linux operating system and will be maintained, primarily by a team of four trained IT specialists, headed by Smith, with support from staff already working in the health system.
