Standards and Guidelines for Electronic Medical Record Systems in ...

One approach to addressing these issues may be to adopt a single EMR for all health care settings in
Kenya (whether public or private, high or low volume, rural or urban. However, it is acknowledged
that information needs differ across settings and even within the public health sector, according to
facility size, technical capacity, the presence or absence of specific activities such as clinical trials
which may impact workflow and health information, goals and requirements of donor agencies,
development partners, and other factors. Given that needs, capacity, and funding differ across
institutions, and that a number of EMR systems tailored to meet these different needs are already in
use across Kenya, it is neither technically nor organizationally feasible to enforce a single national
EMR approach. Such an approach would fail to meet the needs of the health care system countrywide.
At the same time, in order for EMR system to be part of well-defined national eHealth information
architecture, the functions of an EMR system, and the information exchange between the EMR and
other systems, must be well defined. A comprehensive definition of requirements can both ensure
that EMR systems in use in Kenya address the problems identified by the assessments, as well as
facilitate their role and contributions in the national eHealth architecture.
Vision for the EMR Initiative in Kenya
Kenya’s Ministries of Health, through the Division of Health Information System (HIS), envision a
health information enterprise that has, as one of its components, EMR systems that support the
provision of holistic health care while improving on health records management and contributing
to improved quality of patient care. Fundamental to this vision is the need to have systems that can:
· Maintain the validity, integrity and confidentiality of health information
· Ensure security through integrated system checks that prevent access and misuse of data
· Validate the accuracy of captured data.
The single most important feature of the EMR is the facilitation of information sharing between
different users. This inter-operability and data exchange is vital for the success of the HIS
enterprise architecture. In relation to clinical systems, a patient management system should be able
to share relevant patient-level data with a pharmacy or laboratory information system and vice
versa.
Additionally, patient management information systems should provide a degree of decision support
that would help clinicians improve the quality of patient care.
Standards and Guidelines for Electronic Medical Records Systems in Kenya 8