Benefits of a good health information systems; a lesson from far

A visit to a chemist in South Africa sent my head spinning. It’s different from our chemists. If you want self-medication, just go over the counter in our pharmacies and name the drug you want or ask for suggestions.

Then pay and go. Unless you pay via M-Pesa, there is no trail, yet pharmacists are regulated by pharmacies and poison boards.

It’s a different experience elsewhere. At Kleinmond, a small town known for penguins, in South Africa, we stopped to buy flu medication from a chemist.

As the name suggests, the area has many Afrikaans (Boers). It’s about 100 kilometres east of Cape Town.

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Before getting the drug, they needed my name and phone number. The packet I got has both my name and the dispenser’s name (Afrikaans).  

Why all that information? I did not return to ask. But my hunch is that if I get a reaction or something goes wrong, we can trace it back to this pharmacy.

It also makes it easy for the chemist in case I am making a return visit. Why don’t we do that in our pharmacies? One of the big issues in healthcare is data about patients. I think it’s time we created a national database for all patients in Kenya. 

Such a system would capture our health history. The hospitals we have attended and the type of ailment plus prescriptions. We could use it to distribute drugs more efficiently.

We can target specific diseases in specific places leading to less waste through inventories and expiry.  How come Safaricom, banks or Kenya Power have countrywide databases?

Why not in health? Visit another county or hospital and you have to start all over again with a new file.

Such a database would be a researcher’s goldmine. We can easily note spikes in certain diseases and seek early intervention.

We could even investigate the effect of lifestyle on our health, we have regions, their foods and lifestyles. We can run lots of simulations and experiments to understand the disease patterns.

We can easily trace the effectiveness of certain drugs beyond clinical trials. It would be exciting if we played around with variables like inflation, economic growth, religions, weather patterns and even legends and stereotypes about places.

If we now bring in artificial intelligence (AI), we could get patterns we never thought about. And maybe cures. We could get deeper insights into our health and come up with measures to improve national health and cut costs. Is our health, not our wealth?  Over to SHIF.