Becoming Digital

By Dr. Cynthia Mailloux

Africa is a place of creativity and recycling of things large and small. In the USA, one can only imagine using a ship cargo container as storage for patient records. In this photo, you can see how archived patient records were stored at Nyakahanaga Hospital in Tanzania. On the clinical unit, files were kept in a brown folder without sections with the possibility of things being lost or misfiled. Labs were attached to pages of notes. Unlike in the US, there was not a binder neatly holding patient information.

However, this District Hospital has moved into the Digital Age and is changing over to an electronic medical record format. Who would have ever thought I would be assisting with the updating of information into the electronic medical record in Tanzania? After an orientation from the IT person (Mr Vivian Iromba) I was off to help the nursing staff enter patients into the new electronic record system. My first job was to help the nurses who were working on the pediatric unit. There was one computer for 40 children. The good thing was that most were already entered. The next day I assisted the ordering of labs and supplies for patients seen in the Diabetes Clinic. Nothing ever goes without a glitch so there was the need to upload new software before we could get started.

As we know United States nurses usually struggle with change and it is no different in Tanzania. Needing to understand the connectivity to all departments and who was doing what was similar to the challenges nurses experienced at our local facilities. The nurses were eager to learn. However, as everywhere, when the technology did not work, there was frustration.