Effie Schultz

 Medical Informatics
Introduction to Medical Informatics

Keeping registers and records is essential to management. This also applies to medical service provision. For many reasons, not least of which relate to complexity, confidentiality, and legacy, universally-applicable information systems for use in medical service provision have not been developed. Only a few countries have national medical information systems. The electronic medical record poses the greatest challenge to development and implementation. There is however in South Africa, as in many other countries, a plethora of private-sector, stand-alone, non-integrated, manual and computer-based information systems addressing mostly patient demographic data and financial or other isolated aspects of personal medical service provision.

I had over the years used small manual and computer-based programmes which I developed. In 1991, in response to an expressed need at the Alexandra Health Centre and University Clinic in Johannesburg, and with the participation of other members of the staff, I prepared a programme for comprehensive manual and computer data management. Before the programme could be tested a multi-national computer company offered its services to the clinic, together with difficult-to-refuse incentives. This was at the time when tenders were being solicited for a national health information system. I continued to work on my programme and subsequently presented it to academic colleagues and other interested groups. The guidelines and principles were well-received, but the programme which I wrote using Microsoft Access software, was never tested.

The system, together with forms for manual data entry and recommended codes, is outlined in the downloadable file below.

A Health Information System and
a Medical Service Information System

340KB

The copy of the Access file will be sent to anybody requesting it.

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