Health Institutions To Start Taking Digital Records Of Patients

Local public health institutions are expected to start digitally storing patients’ information. The project is expected to start in the next 6 months and will be carried out by “experts” from the UAE and Estonia.

The foreign experts will first complete assessments at the health institutions where they will “see how the proposed system will connect with other systems already in place.”

The system will work in such a way that when a patient goes to a hospital and shares their information with that institution during admission, the records will then be accessible by other departments in that and other health institutions across the country.

The Herald’s report claims that the system will come with the following benefits:

Government will be able to access statistics, record and monitor different disease burdens
Patients will no longer have to narrate their medical history to practitioners

Whilst it’s great that health records will be digitised, one question I have when I see an announcement of this nature is, “don’t we have local talent that can make these systems?”

These are the same question’s that have been asked when Sasai and Vaya were launched by a private company, so it’s not just the government that doesn’t seem to think these things should be built locally.