Impact of Electronic Medical Records Systems in Reporting HIV Health Data Indicators in Kenya

Abstract

Electronic Medical Records Systems (EMRs) improve the quality of patient care and reduce medical errors. Nevertheless, their role in health data indicator reporting performance is unclear. We assessed reporting completeness and timeliness of HIV indicator data to the national aggregate reporting system, District Health Information Software 2 (DHIS2) in Kenya. We compared the reporting performance of facilities with and without EMRs implementation for the year 2013 as EMRs uptake was in progress. The comparative analysis involved 104 facilities implemented with and 152 without KenyaEMR system on three HIV programmatic areas. There were no statistically significant differences in performance regarding reporting completeness and timeliness by facilities with or without EMRs (p-values > 0.05 on all the three areas). The KenyaEMR system assessed in this study, therefore, cannot be associated with the transformed performance in reporting health indicators. This was probably due to the fact that the EMRs do not report electronically to DHIS2. Additional analysis can be conducted to compare reporting performance once data exchange functionality is fully established between KenyaEMR and DHIS2 systems.

Assessing the Use of Hospital Information Systems (HIS) to Support Decision-Making: A Cross-Sectional Study in Public Hospitals in the Huíla Health Region of Southern Angola

“…Similar results were found in a study conducted in the Brong Ahafo region in Ghana on utilising the national cluster of the District Health Information System (DHIS2) for health service decision-making at the district, subdistrict, and community levels. It was found that despite 93% of the health facilities studied submitted data to the DHIS2 platform, the evidence still suggested the low use of these data in decision-making [ 40 , 41 ].…”