Medical keeps growing and that is definitely good news 🙂

I just got back from the north of Argentina, where we are working in the implementation of Medical in a Primary Care Center.

The implementation of Medical in the Primary Care Center will optimize the team work among doctors, administrative workers and health promotion agents. It’s a major project that will translate in a fully operational Hospital Information System. The implementation will not only cover the clinical and socioeconomics data for the patient and families, but all the processes within a hospital (Human Resources, accounting, Supply Chain Management, dashboards, …).

The collected information will be very useful for the health authorities in making effective epidemiological studies and health campaigns, identifying the risk groups in real time and taking proactive measures. There will be a very substantial savings on the medicaments and other goods, since the ordering policies will be automatic.

On this context, I have been invited to participate in IST-Africa 2009 (www.ist-africa.org), that will take place in Kampala, Uganda this May. I am very happy to assist and to be able to talk about the experience of the Medical Project: Implementing an Open Source Hospital Information System (HIS) in rural Argentina.

This project involves a great deal of commitment from a multi-disciplinary team (doctor, nurses, social workers, universities, government health authorities,… ), but I’m convinced that the results are worthed the effort.

I am confident that Medical will translate into a much more efficient way of dealing with public health, and that society will benefit immediately from it.

If you are part of a public health authority, an NGO member and want to contribute or know more about the project, and how could be of help in your region, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

The main project page is at sourceforge : http://medical.sourceforge.net

Thanks
Luis