A $1.3 million grant to Indiana University from the National Institutes of Health's Fogarty International Center will establish the East African Center of Excellence in Health Informatics.
The new center will connect the expertise of one of the world's foremost informatics programs at IU and the Regenstrief Institute with one of the leading academic medical centers in East Africa at Moi University and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital to increase the capacity for electronic health records in one of the worlds' poorest regions. By helping East African countries use electronic health records to increase the efficiency and quality of care, this Center of Excellence grant will help East Africans cross what has been termed "the digital divide."
"To be most efficient and effective, health care delivery and public health needs require timely access to high-quality data," said William Tierney, M.D., of the IU School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute, co-director of the new center. "Developing countries have been on the far side of the digital divide. Without computerized care management, tracking and analysis, these nations have obtained less than optimal outcomes from what they spend on health care." Dr. Tierney, an internationally respected leader in medical informatics, is an Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Chancellor's Professor of Medicine and executive director of the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Improvement and Research.
"Importantly, this Center of Excellence will train East Africans to use electronic tools to solve healthcare problems in their own countries," he said. "My American and Kenyan colleagues have shown in Kenya that in spite of problems such as scarce resources, lack of trained personnel, ethnic tension and even lack of dependable electricity, we can capture data electronically that have been used to enhance health-care outcomes and public health. We believe this is an outstanding model for the millions of men, women and children throughout the developing world."
The new East African Center builds upon nearly two decades of IU School of Medicine and Regenstrief collaboration with Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. This collaboration is responsible for the Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare (AMPATH), one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest health care programs. It is served by the AMPATH Medical Record System (AMRS), the first and most successful outpatient electronic medical record system in sub-Saharan Africa.
Today the AMRS serves 46 urban and rural health centers in western Kenya and contains more than two million visit records for more than 100,000 Kenyans. AMRS has spawned OpenMRS, a free open-source electronic medical record system that is now the most widely adopted electronic medical record system in the developing world. OpenMRS is used in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Malawi, as well as Peru and Haiti. It also has been implemented in several health centers in the United States.