EHR4SA - An evaluation of how the South African eHealth strategy can be supported through the use of Electronic Health Record System
Description: The South African eHealth Strategy was published in 2012 in order to improve the quality and access of primary health care in the country. Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) have been recognized as crucial to the success of the implementation of the strategy as they are expected to allow patient tracking, to increase interoperability of current systems, to diminish fragmentation and to establish a National Patient Master Index.
Sweden is known as a forerunner in health IT with a 100% implementation rate of EHRs in public primary care and hospitals. However, there have been implementation problems such as a lack of policy guidance and interoperability issues between the various systems. This has necessitated Sweden to implement a new national eHealth platform that enables health related data to be accessible across care providers and to the patient through different e-services which are currently introduced.
The aim of this research project is to evaluate how the policy implementation of the eHealth strategy can be supported through EHRs in South Africa. This research will focus on the gap between the eHealth policy published in 2012 and the implementation of EHRs in primary health care. Sweden has made used of EHR systems for many years and will be used to benchmark against as a recognised champion in this area. Sweden has, however, introduced EHR systems long before having a national eHealth strategy, and some of the challenges South Africa is experiencing, such as insufficient continuity of care, are still present in Sweden. It will therefore be interesting to explore some of the lessons learnt from Sweden, if and how these can be transferred to the South Africa context. Socio-technical theory, especially the multidimensional framework by Sittig and Singh to study health IT within complex adaptive healthcare systems, will be used.
Amount: SEK 1,947,000
Funding type: grant
Funder scheme: Unclassified
Start date: 2016-09-01
End date: 2019-08-31
Investigator: Sabine Koch
Institution: Karolinska Institutet
Funded outputs count: 1
Funder award ID: 2016-07324
OpenAlex ID: G799695089