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A Brief Note On The Sub Saharan Africa

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Introduction

Sub-Saharan Africa is a resource-constrained region that suffers a top-heavy share of the world 's burden of disease. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 12% of the world 's population live in sub-Saharan Africa, yet the region suffers 27% of the world 's total burden of disease [1]. To make the matter worse, the same region with a high burden of disease still lags in health information technology (HIT) which is vital in ensuring improved patients care [2,3-7]. Timely as well as accurate patient information is essential to meet the health care needs of any patient in any population. Physicians and other care providers require high-quality information to make sound clinical decisions; however, their …show more content…

It contains retrospective, concurrent, and prospective information and its primary purpose is to support continuing, efficient and quality integrated health care”[10].
EHR has been identified to be an important integral part of an efficient healthcare information system that guarantees positive health outcomes [3, 5, 7, 11].

Many studies conducted in different health care settings have indicated that EHR will assist health professionals to reduce medical errors, achieve better effective care coordination, improve safety and quality, and also, it can reduce health care costs [2, 4, 6, 7, 12, 13]. Healthcare systems, like all business entities, are information-intensive enterprises [14]. Healthcare workers require adequate data and information management tools to make accurate decisions, both while caring for patients and while managing and running the enterprise, to document and communicate plans and activities, and to meet the requirement of the regulatory and accrediting organization [14]. Currently, the use of an EHR includes clinical care application/functions, clinical research function, and administrative function. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) highlights that a more immediate access to computer-based clinical information, such as laboratory and radiology results, can reduce redundancy and improve quality [15]. Similarly, the availability of complete patient health information at the point of care delivery,

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