New e-project to help fight drug theft in hospitals, monitor attendance
The permanent secretary in the Ministry of ICT, Dr Aminah Zawedde, has said the Integrated Health Facility Management system (IHMIS) e-government project will help fight drug theft in health centres.
In a statement she said that IHMIS, a government initiative health monitoring system is part of the e-government program whose implementation will improve services in the health sector.
IHMIS is a collection of software components representing different business processes carried out in a health facility.
"Now under the Ministry of ICT and and National Guidance and working directly with the ministry of health, IHMIS was designed by a team of Ugandan Scientists as part of the wider Integrated Intelligent Computer System (IICS),"she said.
It supports management functions both at the local, district and national level and has so far been deployed in over 10 Regional Referral hospitals with over 60 general hospitals and health centre IVs scheduled to have the same by end of this financial year.
The automated system helps to curb drug theft in health centres, monitors health worker attendance, manages medical records and, tracks expiry of drugs among others.
In one pilot study done at Mulago National Referral Hospital, a number of achievements were realised, among which were reduction of expired of medicines.
The pilot study also led to increase in accountability of medicines and medical supplies from around 38% to 80%, reduction in unnecessary over-ordering of certain drug volumes like Sodium Chloride which was reduced from around 2,000 cartons a month to slightly below 800 cartons a month.
