Soft Power Mukagwa Allan Stone Community Health is an NGO HCIII facility located in Kyabirwa, Budondo Sub-county, Jinja District. The health facility receives a daily average of 150 patients. The facility was started in 2005 to provide and promote community health care through a full-serviced primary health clinic with an affordable pricing scheme and educational outreach activities with nearly 50,000 beneficiaries every year.

The health facility provides a number of services including preventive and control malaria, hypertension, and diabetes education outreaches, primary and preventive health care catering only for OPD services, etc.

Below were the top 3 challenges Soft Power Mukagwa Allan Stone Community health faced before taking on Stre@mline EMR.

• Patient records management: Patient records were recorded on paper yellow cards. Patients would often lose these cards. Therefore, their previous medical records could not easily be traced. This means that some procedures have to be repeated costing the patients money.
• Procurement Process and Stock Management. Due to multiple Local Purchase Orders (LPOs) being generated and sent to different suppliers, tracking down each LPO with its supplier proved to be an arduous task. Additionally, tracking the expiry dates of the drugs in the different batches was difficult since procurement and stock management were being handled by a manual system.
• HMIS Reporting. At the end of every month, reports have to be generated and sent to the various facility donors, hospital management, and the Ministry of Health. This presented an error margin in reporting especially of the HMIS 105 which requires entries of all the diagnosis. A lot of load was created for the staff since everything was being done manually.

Actions Taken

• Stre@mline EMR was installed by the Stre@mline Team at Soft Power Mukagwa Allan Stone Community Health Care premises on 1st June, 2023.
• A total of 34 staff members were trained on how to use the stre@mline EMR in a period of 2 weeks. These included: the facility administrators, medical doctors, clinicians, OPD nurses (Pharmacists, Stores Manager), and receptionists.
• Soft Power Mukagwa Allan Stone Communityhealth was able to setup their prices lists (Drugs, Sundries) which were uploaded and the stock reconciliations for both pharmacy and stores were performed.
• All diagonises were setup with their right HMIS outpatient numbers and the respective HMIS categories to ease the reports generation of the different HMIS reports.

Results

As of June 16th 2023, Soft Power Mukagwa had registered a total of more than 1000 patients with a total of 1064 episodes created, 3635 investigations ordered, 888 prescriptions made, 959 diagnoses captured, 952 consultations performed.

Hannah Fromont, the facility manager, says that she can now easily monitor patient flow at each of the patient points; consultation, lab, pharmacy, etc. and adjust accordingly in case of patient delays. This has helped to reduce on patient waiting times and hence, the customer service and overoll healthcare effeciency has greatly improved because of Stre@mline.