Implementing OpenMRS for patient monitoring in an HIV/AIDS care and treatment program in rural Mozambique

• Published in: Studies in health technology and informatics Vol. 160; no. Pt 1; p. 411
• Main Authors: Manders, Eric-Jan, José, Eurico, Solis, Manuel, Burlison, Janeen, Nhampossa, José Leopoldo, Moon, Troy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands 2010
• Subjects: Database Management Systems - organization & administration; Delivery of Health Care - organization & administration; Electronic Health Records - organization & administration; HIV Infections - diagnosis; HIV Infections - epidemiology; HIV Infections - therapy; Information Storage and Retrieval - methods; Medical Record Linkage - methods; Mozambique; Population Surveillance - methods; Rural Health Services - organization & administration; Mozambique
• ISSN: 0926-9630
• DOI: 10.3233/978-1-60750-588-4-411

We have adopted the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) framework to implement an electronic patient monitoring system for an HIV care and treatment program in Mozambique. The program provides technical assistance to the Ministry of Health supporting the scale up of integrated HIV care and support services in health facilities in rural resource limited settings. The implementation is in use for adult and pediatric programs, with ongoing roll-out to cover all supported sites. We describe early experiences in adapting the system to the program needs, addressing infrastructure challenges, creating a regional support team, training data entry staff, migrating a legacy database, deployment, and current use. We find that OpenMRS offers excellent prospects for in-country development of health information systems, even in severely resource limited settings. However, it also requires considerable organizational infrastructure investment and technical capacity building to ensure continued local support.