eHealth TABLET: A Developing Country Perspective in Managing the Development and Deployment of a Mobile - Cloud Electronic Medical Record for Local Government Units

Abstract

In January 2013, the eHealth TABLET (Technology Assisted Boards for Local government unit Efficiency and Transparency) project began with a two-fold objective of: 1) creating a tablet based system that will integrate existing health information systems to address the national objective of a unified health information management system by 2015 and 2) to create a transparency layer at the local government units such that communication lines between municipal health officers and the mayor are monitored. Bottom up approach was used to ensure that all features requested by multi-stakeholders are included in the design of the system. The end product was a mobile - web based system with the mobile application having three main components: the electronic medical record (EMR) application which comprises of the patient record and diagnosis module, the requests/approval application, and the dashboard application for data visualization. Responding to the needs of intended users, the web based application provides the following features: web auxiallry entry, aggregated disease report application and usage monitoring. Regular usage monitoring increased usage over time. For ICT development projects in public health, iteratve involvement of multi-stakeholders is necessary to ensure higher acceptance and adoption. From a design perspective, technologies should be designed to be interoperable such that interfacing with existing systems will be seamless.