Philomena Waruhari
Fellows Track:
Health Informatics
Laboratory results are paramount in ensuring quality of care to patients as they form the basis for disease diagnosis and timely treatment leading to better health outcomes. However, availability of patients’ laboratory results to the clinician in a timely and efficient manner is a challenge in most health care facilities as a result of the manual systems used in handling patients’ data. In particular, at KNH CCC facility, during the project implementation period, it was characterized by missing or misfiled laboratory results with up to 20 cases of missing results reported per day. Situational analysis showed the cause of the problem to be due to overworked staff as well as the distance between CCC’s records section where filing of laboratory results took place and KNH records department where patients’ files were stored. The benefits of adoption of innovative ICT technologies in health care delivery, with a particular focus on automated laboratory services were discussed. The project developed and implemented an integrated laboratory information system for KNH CCC laboratory which serves People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV). It involved application of innovative interfacing techniques to link the main laboratory clinical analyzers to Laboratory Information Systems and International Quality Care (IQCare) Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system thereby facilitating automatic data acquisition and transmission. Thus, there was availability of test results to clinicians guaranteed, a reduction in transcription errors and increased productivity of the laboratory technicians as they were released from simple routine work to more skilled tasks. The project was implemented under the close supervision of the project supervisor and the mentor. The project period was one year.
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