The Need for Health Informatics (HI) in Enhancing Botswana Health System Surveillance: A Case Study of Botswana Health Posts

Technology never ceases to amaze. Innovative health care technologies, treatments, medications and procedures are being developed quickly, and all health practitioners of various backgrounds are expected to integrate them into their daily practices, assimilating both old and new knowledge, applying it to their patients, retaining information about each individual patient including being able to communicate quickly with them. Achieving all this in the past has been difficult, due to lack of centralized systems to store, organize and retrieve such records. Nowadays, such systems do exist.

Health informatics is one field providing such systems. Health informatics (HI) earliest usage occurred in the 1950s by the National Bureau of Standards, and its usage has gathered pace all over the world with countries such as USA, UK, New Zealand, Australia and China enjoying its benefits. Botswana is trailing far behind with more than 61.9% not aware of it. Botswana’s usage of HI is far less than 40% and only centralized in urban centers, and only on less than 10% of its diverse usage, painting a bleak future on the country’s vision 2016!

It’s a calamitous situation that our government and together with the Private Sector haven’t taken note and jointly find ways of improving the Health Informatics sector, as the study found. The study utilized mixed methods approach on a population size of 117 from 3 different areas of Botswana, covering a wide range of topics, including the medical record system, access to current information, clinical reminders, clinical decision support, electronic communication, patient education, and the benefits of health informatics to a health system. This research has shown that Botswana can greatlybenefit to this growing sector.