Browsing by Author "Shoopala, Anna-Liisa"

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    Design of a backend system to integrate health information systems – case study: ministry of health and social services (MoHSS)-Namibia
    (2021) Shoopala, Anna-Liisa; Mwangama, Joyce
    Information systems are the key to institution organization and decision making. In the health care field, there is a lot of data flow, from the patient demographic information (through the electronic medical records), the patient's medication dispersal methods called pharmaceutical data, laboratory data to hospital organization information such bed allocation. Healthcare information system is a system that manages, store, transmit and display healthcare data. Most of the healthcare data in Namibia are unstructured, there is a heterogeneous environment in which different health information systems are distributed in different departments [1][2]. A lot of data is generated but never used in decision-making due to the fragmentation. The integration of these systems would create a flood of big data into a centralized database. With information technology and new generation networks becoming a called for innovations in every day's operations, the adaptations of accessing big data through information applications and systems in an integrated way will facilitate the performances of practical work in health care. The aim of this dissertation is to find a way in which these vertical Health Information System can be integrated into a unified system. A prototype of a back-end system is used to illustrate how the present healthcare systems that are in place with the Ministry of Health and Social Service facilities in Namibia, can be integrated to promote a more unified system usage. The system uses other prototypes of subsystems that represent the current systems to illustrate how they operate and, in the end, how the integration can improve service delivery in the ministry. The proposed system is expected to benefit the ministry in its daily operations as it enables instant authorized access to data without passing through middlemen. It will improve and preserve data integrity by eliminating multiple handling of data through a single data admission point. With one entry point to the systems, manual work will be reduced hence also reducing cost. Generally, it will ensure efficiency and then increase the quality of service provided.