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• Earl Jones 10 years ago

  "The Medical Superintendent said doctors and nurses at the hospital found it very difficult to trace her history to enable them to offer the necessary assistance, and she did not tell the doctors and nurses about the operatio ...
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  "The Medical Superintendent said doctors and nurses at the hospital found it very difficult to trace her history to enable them to offer the necessary assistance, and she did not tell the doctors and nurses about the operations she underwent during the delivery of her three children, and that mainly caused her death and that of her baby."
  
  This should not be happening in this day and age of technology. A basic longitudinal electronic health record would have saved these two lives.
  
  It is unfair to blame the mother for revealing her previous medical history without knowing whether she was capable of doing so. What if she was delirious, confused or emotionally incapable of communicating effectively?
  
  In the west, electronic health records (EHR) have become pervasive capturing all health interventions and making the information available to health care professionals, doctors and nurses, in real time enabling them to make life saving decisions.
  
  The good thing is that EHR does not need huge sums of money to set up but just brain power.
  
  In places like the UK, not only has every patient got an up to date health record, these records are fully integrated enabling the health providers to retrieve the patient’s information regardless of where the healthcare was delivered in the country.
  
  In the case of this poor mother and baby, doctors would have been, within seconds, able to retrieve her full medical records showing her past history of problems, diagnosis and procedures carried out on her. Even her allergy status, blood group, vital signs, medications and tests including results carried out on the pregnant woman over her life time would have been immediately available to the doctors and nurses.
  
  It is time for the government of the day to invest in an integrated electronic health record system in Ghana. It makes healthcare delivery cheaper and more efficient. It will do away with paper based records and enable doctors to have an invaluable source of decision support. Search and retrievable of the patient’s medical history will also be easier than currently going through a unhygienic pile of dusty folders in the archives.
  Analysis can also be done on the historical records in order to have a better idea of how healthy Ghanaians are, use the data for epidemiological study and help in health planning and surveillance.

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