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

esponsible for utilizing the information generated from the HIS and the EMR system for decisionmaking.
These include:
1. Regional Administrators – Provincial and District Medical and Public Health Officers
2. Facility Administrators – Medical Superintendents and Medical Officers in Charge
3. Clinic In-charges
The managers are a vital component of any EMR installation and their support must be assured in
the planning stages. The managers will not be involved in the actual operations of the EMR systems
but will need to know, from a general outlook, the role of the system within the health setting, the
functions performed by the EMR, and how the EMR functions impact patient care within the facility.
The facility managers ought to be involved in the identification and assigning of specific roles and
responsibilities to facility based users and IT support staff. Involvement of the health managers
ensures ownership of and accountability for the health systems along with the data and information
generated.
Core competencies for high-level managers
The primary competencies for high-level managers relate to the use of information for decisionmaking.
Since their ability to make well informed decisions relies on the quality, accuracy, and
timeliness of the data available to them, high level managers must be able to recognize quality data,
understand the implications of data on their decision making process, correctly diagnose poor
quality data and address the underlying causes. For instance, high level managers who are familiar
with how data is collected, entered, and managed within the EMR and HIS system are in a stronger
position to identify the source of poor data and to take the appropriate action to remedy the
situation that resulted in poor data being made available.
As with facility based users, high-level managers will benefit from a basic understanding of how an
EMR system functions. Since high level managers inform what data needs to be collected and stored
in the EMR system, having a general understanding of the EMR software support and maintenance
system similar to that of facility based users is recommended. This requires strong computer
literacy skills as well as general familiarity with the basic functions of the EMR system.
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