Description of Session
Automation of the Zambian Supply chain system has received increased attention in the last few years like many developing countries. This has occurred in tandem with similar initiatives in the wider eHealth environment. While these yield strategic opportunities in strengthening health service delivery, resultant challenges include; duplication of resources, fragmentation of data and insignificant reduction of workload for health care workers and key stakeholders. Health systems managers are tasked with providing timely and accurate data for decision making but often find it difficult to get the data they need from one system which has led to the call for integration. The integration of SmartCare (the national Electronic Health Record) and eLMIS (the national electronic logistics management information system) is currently being piloted and has already shown some promising results. The need to match service delivery data with logistics data is difficult without integration. The integration workflow is simple; clients are registered in SmartCare and prescriptions are sent to the eLMIS Facility Edition. The eLMIS manages inventory at the dispensary and is used to dispense drugs to the clients based on the prescription received. This has significantly reduced the data entry burden for healthcare workers. System managers shall soon be able to tell the exact number of clients on a particular regimen and other indicators by simply running a report online. Enhancing strategic data visibility has been demanded by stakeholders the demand for the reliability of reference data for both systems to work effectively has increased the attention paid to data quality.
