Lesotho is faced with poor health services as there are a number of ineffective coordination of care and poor community services and treatment. This comes as a result of poor medical history of patients and inconsistent records about patients. Medical practitioners use paper medical booklets where they record little of the medical information of patients and this does not give full details of what the patients has and what measures are taken to treat that disease. These booklets are easily lost and thus, the new one is required and since there is no synchronizing with the old booklet, it means all medical history has vanished. It becomes risky and difficult to perform surgery or operations on a patient if there is no up to date and consistent medical history and at times complications such as death are experienced.
this means, there is ineffective treatment and diagnosis of patients and poor coordination of care more especially when a patient is referred to a different doctor. Different doctors rely on a written booklet of which few details are noted and worse enough the doctor has to guess about the sickness of their patient when the booklet is lost.
Electronic booklet is decentralized online system that all medical practitioners will use to record and view up to date medical records of patients. If a patient visits a different health facility apart from their regular facility, all their medical records are accessible to authorized practitioners. This leads to improved coordination of care and effective treatment and diagnosis of patients hence improving health facilities in Lesotho.
Electronic booklet database has user friendly database features that will enable both medical practitioners and front lines of health to easily use the system. The features include name of hospital the patient has visited, name of a doctor or a nurse attending to the patient. There is patient unique identification (primary key) which will be used for identification of patients to avoid confusion where patients share the same name. This unique id is used to retrieve all detailed records of the patient, that is, tracking all medical history of the patient. More importantly, practitioners use this database to write down all relevant and detailed report of their patients after or during treatment (symptoms, disease discovered, action taken by practitioner, recommendation for treatment)
Moreover, it will also be of immense help in the scientific evaluation and review of patient management issues. Medical records form an important part of the management of a patient. It is important for doctors and medical establishments to properly maintain the records of patients for two important reasons. The first one is that it will help them in the scientific evaluation of their patient profile, helping in analyzing the treatment results and to plan treatment protocols. It also helps in planning government strategies for future medical care.
