The ministry of Health has assured innovators that it is determined to make the OpenMRS system work to improve information use in medical sector.

The Open Medical Resources System was designed by American health workers in 2004, to help gather information from health centres, to be used for disease surveillance.

Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng told a gathering of innovators from 32 countries at Speke Resort Munyonyo, on Tuesday, that her sector was committed to improving the administration of e-health.

“We note the importance of this development, which is why we are working with Makerere University’s school of Public Health to scale up OpenMRS from 425 health centres to 1,000 by the end of 2017,” Aceng said.

In the speech, read by Dr Sarah Byakika, commissioner for Planning at the ministry, Aceng emphasized the need for the new system to work with the established District Health Information Systems-II, to improve disease surveillance in the country, over time.

“That is why we are hoping that during the ‘hackathon’, which starts on Saturday [tomorrow] we will establish a link between OpenMRS and DHIS-II in the shortest time possible.”

According to one of the four developers of OpenMRS, Dr Peter Biondich, the system was designed to work in a health centre in Kenya in 2004, due to the need to document health information there.

“The fact that it has expanded this far is a bonus beyond what we had anticipated,” he said. ”Our hope is that this system can only grow to such a level that it will have significance in disease surveillance where it is deployed.”

The dean of Makerere University’s school of Public Health, Prof William Bazeyo, spoke of the need for capacity to interpret and use the data.

“It is all good to collect information; but this data will be useless and meaningless unless we can interpret it correctly to ensure it has the desired impact on the common man in the health centre,” Bazeyo said.

“It is also important that we have the right personnel to collect and interpret this data for proper use in public health.”