– Minister Lawrence tells stakeholder at start of crafting of eHealth strategy

MINISTER of Public Health, Volda Lawrence has had it with all the talk about access to information; she believes it’s time for some action, and said as much Thursday.

“We want to ensure that we have the data so that our plans, that our budgetting, that our programmes would not be done in abstract but rather will be data-driven,” she said.

“In that way, we do know that we will be able to be more efficient in what we do and the service that we provide,” she told participants Thursday at the launch of a two-day stakeholder workshop on the crafting of an eHealth strategy for the public health sector.

She believes that an eHealth strategy would help the ministry save money that could be better spent on other areas in the health sector. And so does PAHO-WHO’s Dr. William Adu-Krow, who earlier said that an eHealth strategy will boost local information systems and provide strategic information for evidence-based decision-making.
“The strategy will guide all information systems for health in the coming years,” Dr Adu-Krow said, adding:
“After the meeting, we hope to have strong methodologies, plans and output to do the work.”

Workshop participants will work collaboratively to determine the specific approach for developing Guyana’s national eHealth strategy, including governance structures, key roles and responsibilities, identification of stakeholders and stakeholder engagement methods, key timelines and technical support requirements.

These decisions will be documented by the PAHO-WHO technical consultant in the form of a roadmap and workplan to guide the development of the national strategic plan.

The goal of the workshop is to enable national stakeholders to plan the development, implementation and monitoring of an effective national eHealth strategy, based on the use of WHO-ITU national eHealth strategy toolkit.

Facilitators from PAHO will be sensitising national stakeholders on the framework and process of developing and implementing a national eHealth strategy.

PAHO-WHO has implemented a project for strengthening regional, sub-regional and country capacity for Information Systems for Health (IS4H).

The project is to implement better decision and policy-making mechanisms in member countries, through effective heath systems that ensure universal, free and timely access to quality and open data, and strategic information using the most cost-effective Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools.

One of the main objectives of this project is to introduce a renewed vision that helps to establish a general framework of operation, and a common understanding of the specific moments of information systems for health.

The project seeks to define and implement strategies, policies and standards for inter-operable and inter-connected systems and best practices in health data management for improving decision-making and well-being under the framing of four overarching strategic approaches.

The four overarching approaches are: Universal health coverage; health in all policies; eGovernment ; and open and big data initiatives.

It seeks to build on existing projects, systems and structures and is based on the assumption of incremental strengthening.