In the last week of the first term, I attended a module on Healthcare Information Systems. The broad objectives of the module was to address how ICTs can be used in the health sector to improve the delivery of health services. In the delivery of the module, there was a strong focus on design and implementation of systems used by health professionals. The systems discussed included e-prescriptions and electronic patient records.

However, my interest in module was mainly on how ICTs are used for empowering patients and/or citizens in order to keep them healthy. In light of this, I will just discuss things that were of particular interest to me-mostly in a point form format.

Prerequisites

In venturing in any health related project some of the things to truly understand are:

• Education is a cornerstone — this possibly sounds like a cliché but knowledge is power! Without knowledge citizens’ ability to maintain a good health or access health services may be minimised.
• Proper healthcare requires a holistic approach — this means to achieve any significant results in health, all stakeholders need to be involved. This in a sense should explain why everyone needs to be engaged with issues relating to HIV/Aids.
• Health has other dimensions to it other than just lacking disease. One such dimension is the individuals ability to cope with daily living as well as physical and mental stress.
• Good telecommunication infrastructure is key to any health promotion initiatives– this is goes again to all arguments made about the digital divide.

General Pressures in Healthcare

Getting everyone healthy – or rather in a ‘positive state of well-being’ has its own pressures. Some of the things that need to be considered which can increase the pressure include:

• Altering population — with the HIV/Aids pandemic for example, continuous burden is being placed on the old to provide care and the old themselves due to aging require care (this sadly is the price for aging 🙂 ). An important dimension to this altering population particularly as it applies to my project is how useful will the developed system be to the senior citizens?
• Expensive new medicine plus other healthcare related costs
• Rapid increase in knowledge –with growing breakthroughs on how to efficiently deal with specific diseases things can get overwhelming to both care-givers and ordinary citizens. For example, consider the case of TB, people through various health education and promotion programmes had a basic understanding of how to deal with TB but with the new resistant strain (XDR-TB) there much ado about nothing!

Health Impact Assessment (HIA)

This topic I found it very interesting although the subject itself has a lot to do with policy makers. Although HIA is similar to evaluation, it differs with it in that it doesn’t just examine the consequences of decision making, it also explores how effective an intervention was in improving health and well-being of citizens. Other benefits include the fact that HIA:

• promotes cross-sectional working
• encourages inclusion of views of community since it uses a participatory approach
• improves health and reduces inequalities
• links with sustainable development and resource management
• encourages ethical use of evidence

Some of the above benefits can actually be used to justify on the one hand why I would need to collaborate with individuals from the faculty of education. On the other hand, the benefits can be used to justify the need to have my system assessed once in operation.

The ‘e’ in e-health

I thought just for the fun of it to include what the ‘e’ stands for e-health:

• efficiency
• enhancing quality of care
• evidence based
• empowerment of consumers and patients
• encouragement
• education
• enabling information exchange
• ethics
• equity