BCC clinics migrate to e-patient treatment

BULAWAYO City Council (BCC) has announced plans to commence the use of electronic health records (EHR) for all patients visiting council-run clinics. According to council, this is in line with the city’s A Leading, Smart, Transformative City by 2024 vision.

Already, council health staff has undergone training on the use of EHR, a system that will build on the existing electronic patient monitoring system.

The EHR programme was initially set for implementation around March, but was suspended due to COVID-19 restrictions.

“EHR was an e-first, where the patients were captured while being seen by the health worker. Reports could be generated upon request, for example, weekly, monthly and quarterly ...,” a latest council report by the health, housing and education committee read.

“Forty-five registers, and it was cumbersome to write registers when attending to patients. The EHR system will greatly reduce the burden of all these registers. Demographic details will be captured and shared across all modules.”

Assessment of the health facilities in the city for the EHR programme was conducted by the council’s information technology section.

The local authority received the network equipment for the EHR programme from America Centre for Disease Control through ICAP (formerly the International Centre for Aids Care and Treatment Programmes) in February 2020.

Installation and cabling of the health facilities was done in the same month with configuration of wireless access points beginning on February 20, 2020.