Benefits Of Having A Full Health Information System

Basseterre, St. Kitts, January 29, 2021 (ZIZ News)  Minister of Health, the Honourable Akilah Byron-Nisbett has said that all stakeholders stand to benefit from having a full health information system.

The Minister was at the time speaking in a recent interview with ZIZ news about the build out and full execution of the Health Information System at all hospitals and community-based institutions in the federation.

She explained that having the full health history of an individual readily available is beneficial to the doctors, patients and administrators.

“Imagine being able to go into the hospital…and with a swipe of a card your entire health history is provided. Once you have someone’s full health history it helps you diagnose whatever it is that issue that they present themselves now because it could be related to something else. There are persons who come in and at that point when they are sick they cannot remember what’s happened to them and sometimes paper records it’s a bit choppy because all the information isn’t there at least with the health information system it forces our doctors, our nurses and all of us within the administration to enter all of a patient’s information.”

Minister Byron-Nisbett stated that the health information system will ensure the flow of data between hospitals and community based institutions.

She said the system is already in place however a number of steps have to be taken before it can be used.

“Everything is there it’s just for us to begin to use it…it needs to go through a series so we have to make sure everybody is trained within the Ministry of Health on using the application so the doctors, the nurses, the clerks, the lab techs, the persons in the pharmacy, the persons in stores-everybody need to be able to know how to use the system so there’s a series of training. After we do training then we’re going to go through a phased approach so we’re going to have the system working but then we’ll also have the manual process working together just to make sure its capturing what we need it to capture and everything is working as it should –if there are any glitches at least we would still have the paper, we can fix the glitches and then start again, then we’re going to go through a series where we just move straight into the application but making sure there technicians that are still holding their hands through the process and then once we go live fully that’s when everybody within the institution using it without any type of assistance and we’re hoping to get that done this year.”

The Minister said the JNF General Hospital and the Mary Charles Hospital were chosen to utilize the system first before fully being implemented.

As it relates to private doctors using the system, the Minister said it is being considered for future implementation.