Patient Identification and Hospital Information Management Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: a Prospective Study in Rwanda and Burundi

ABSTRACT

For many sub-Saharan health facilities; accurate patient identification remains a challenge. Poor national person identification systems; inefficient identification procedures; the use of weak search criteria and sometimes fraudulent practice consist some of the underlying causes. In this study; patient identification effectiveness has been compared between 27 sub-Saharan hospitals using paper based procedures and 6 health facilities in the same region that had implemented a hospital information management system. Based on a simple metric; results show a significant (p0.001) improvement reducing identification errors from 64.6 before to 2.3 after information system implementation in a sample of 1 private and 5 public hospitals in Rwanda and Burundi