For the longest time in Uganda and other African countries, patient data was always stored manually on paper. If you think back to before the mid 2000’s, every time you visited a hospital, you were given a form to fill and the hospital would create a physical file for you. All this was done manually.
This made it difficult for hospitals to integrate pieces of data, share patient data during referrals, monitor flow of drugs and in the worst cases, patient misdiagnosis.
Wilson Kutegeka, a health professional in Uganda experienced firsthand the risk of such operations and he knew he had to think of a solution.
An avoidable situation leads to loss of life
After working in the medical field in Uganda for many years, Wilson keenly observed some of the challenges and gaps in the field that unfortunately led to avoidable consequences and loss of lives.
In 2006, as Wilson was going about his work facilitating HIV/AIDS research in a local healthcare centre in Uganda, they received news that a 14-year-old child who was one of the patients in that facility had passed away. The child was staying with his grandmother who was not able to come pick his medication on time.
This situation was deeply saddening for Wilson because at that time, the facility had enough resources to reach out to this child and deliver the medicine but because there was no system that could alert them that the boy had missed his last medication appointment, it was too late to save his life.
At that moment, Wilson’s priority became developing a system that would send alerts every time someone missed their appointment. He was able to adjust the current facility’s system to manage appointments so that the doctor, pharmacist or any other staff member can schedule appointments and be notified in case a patient has not shown up and all this happens online.
Later on, Wilson realized the need to interconnect the different service points so that it makes it easy to share medical data within the healthcare facility. The positive impact from this initiative in that one facility inspired Wilson to take the solution to more hospitals and clinics in Uganda since most of them faced that common challenge of not being able to track patient data.