28th February 2023
Own Correspondent
With the support of the Ministry partners and stakeholders, the Ministry of Health has successfully utilized technology to help bring Gaborone, Letlhakane, Hukuntsi and Jwaneng together to beneficially harness ICT technology to help serve people better.
“This development is also in line with the aspirations of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal number three, which calls upon UN member states to do all in their power to increase people’s access to quality health services, by 2030. With the digitalization of health services, the ministry now expects more Batswana to have better access to quality health services, including access to specialists based in faraway places from them,” said Sethomo Lelatisitswe, acting Minister of Health.
He said, “Digitalization has now become a must for all organizations that take themselves seriously and wish to do things the 21st century way. Indeed the health sector cannot be left behind when technology becomes the way to go, as it has.”
With technology, people can receive services faster and more efficiently and access to better health services, is built on the speed with which patients are attended.
The African Union of which Botswana is a member has also committed to helping member states digitalize their services by 2030. The African Union Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030), aims to harness digital technologies and innovation to transform African societies and economies to break the world digital divide.
The strategy aims at improving Africa’s socio-economic development and to ensure ownership of modern tools of digital management. Our own Vision 2036 also has the same aspirations.
it was upon this background that Botswana’s Ministry of Health took the conscious decision to launch and implement the Digitalization of Health Services project dubbed “TsogoJwame, #GoDigitalHealth.”
The digitalization project is intended to integrate management of all various digitalization initiatives, improve interoperability and sharing of information across the health sector with the ultimate aim of delivering better patient experiences.
Through this approach clinicians will be better equipped with tools and resources to enhance access to real time patient information and enable evidence based decision making.
The digitalization of health services will therefore, reshape the doctor-patient experience and ultimately give the patient access to quality and accurate health care.
Health systems around the globe are leveraging on technology to improve health services delivery. Here at home we have long desired to make our health systems more responsive, equitable, efficient, effective, and sustainable.
Several attempts were made as early as NDP 7; through NDP 8 and 9 which led to the introduction of the District Health Information System and later the Integrated Patient Management System (IPMS), Patient Management Information Systems (PIMS), and some degree of teleradiology 5. Notwithstanding these efforts progress was limited and the impact was minimal.
Numerous challenges were identified such as inefficiencies in the management of health information contributing to weak decision making and resource allocation; multiple incoherent systems leading to inefficiencies in delivery of services and poor data quality. Consequently two major strategies were put in place to address the challenges identified – the E-health strategy (2020-2024) & Health Data Collaborative (2020-2025) identifying priority areas, key initiatives to be undertaken, investment needed and the governance structures to facilitate implementation.
The impetus for implementation however came as a response to His Excellency’s Reset Agenda, the urgent call for digitalization of services. We started our journey with establishment of the digitalization project team- This was to mainly give the implementation of our e-health/digitalization strategy a push (From strategy to Implementation).
“Our immediate task was to reimagine the health system-We led development of A Vision for the health sector from where we are sitting today. We engaged our stakeholders on this vision so that it is A SHARED VISION (Public and Private as one health system),” said Dr. Onalenna Seitio–Kgokgwe is the Deputy Permanent Secretary-Monitoring, Evaluation, and Quality Assurance in the Ministry of Health.
She said, “Next, we developed digitalization maturity assessment tool that both public and private sector facilities can use as a gauge of digital maturity and be able to measure growth and effectiveness of digitalization initiatives.”
Botswana can be proud of this product as, it’s a first in the world to be done digitally in the health sector and was developed by Batswana.
The new system will create an Electronic Medical Record which will in time eradicate paper based medical cards. This system will run across all clinics across in the country allowing sector to have a history of a patient regardless of the clinics visited.
The Digitalization of health services project has under its innovative solutions to bring in data from the sector as a whole to allow service providers a 360 degree view of the patient through what we call the Health Information Exchange (HIE). This tool allows us to have the private practitioners plugin into the HIE giving both sectors a unified view of a patient.
“We are now here, where we will be able to see a patient history regardless of the facility visited. As I stand here we have through this initiative connected to Omang, such that through the HIE, all Electronic Medical Record systems will be able to interpret and verify a patient record and unify the patient data. Work is still underway to connect the Integrated Patient Information System, The Government Accounting and Budgeting Systems and others to ensure we synergize our functions within government and across our strategic partners such as the Medical Aid organizations, enabling us to give the citizen convenience through many health services including easy payments,” said Dr Seitio–Kgokgwe
The digitalization of Health services project will provide a national repository of all health data in the country, through the health information exchange all data sources connect to the data warehouse where patient records are merges to create a longitudinal record for every patient in the country.
The ministry, through the health informatics team and the assistance of our partners, is developing a business intelligence tool that will provide all levels of leadership from district level to national level with analytics dashboards that will aid in information processing and decision making.
The Ministry of Health also has a few projects up its sleeve such as Telemedicine, Teleradiology, Connected Ambulance and Drones for Health through which we will reach our furthest clients with easy. Work in these areas is currently on going and includes development of the Telemedicine Policy which should guide the use of this technology for the protection of the client.
