MPI and OPC/EMR successfully deployed for pilot

HCMC PAC - During the week of September 17, two software development partners of the HIS project in Ho Chi Minh city (HCMC) successfully deployed the master patient index system (MPI) and the electronic medical record (EMR) management system at one HIV voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) site and one HIV outpatient clinic (OPC), both in district 1, HCMC.

This was done right after the HIS technical support trip of I-TECH, CHAI and CDC to HCMC to assist in reviewing the implementation plan and the next steps of software development. A two-day training course was also planned and conducted for system end-users who are VCT staff, OPC doctors, nurses and administrative staff in order to use the systems during pilot period.

According to project plan, there would be two sites for each program joining the pilot including those in Thu Duc district and District 1, both are in HCMC, but the system deployment in Thu Duc district will not be happening until the week of September 24 - 28, though system end users were already trained the week before. One thing worth mentioning is these two districts were voluntary to be pilot sites and have joined as key system end-users to share domain expertise and experiences during system design and development. Training materials were drafted by software vendors including presentations, system use scenarios, and user manuals, carefully reviewed by PAC, CDC and I-TECH experts, and then instructions were provided onsite in the real system just deployed. First impression to say was users who joined the training seemed very excited and found the system functions easy enough to use.

The pilot of MPI will be taking one and a half month before the system is rolled out to the other 18 VCT sites in the city, and the OPC/EMR will be continuously piloted until March 2013 when all software functions are completed and tested before rolling out to additional provinces.

Additional Information

"MPI - the master patient index system is implemented with an aim to manage demographics and identification information of all HIV patients enrolling into care and treatment. This will help maintain a registry of HIV patients linked with other information systems to support for the continuity of care for the patients. Currently, the MPI has been successfully linked with the OPC/EMR for exchange of demographics, identification, and the treatment summary information. Bio-metric technology (fingerprint) is used to ensure uniqueness of patient records in the system.

OPC/EMR - the electronic medical record system that will be used at point of care to manage both adult and pediatric HIV patients at outpatient clinics and other programs including PMTCT. Development of this robust system was divided into 2 phases, of which phase 1 has been completed and deployed for pilot with basic functions to manage patient demographics and clinical information, patient referrals/transfer, clinical orders and a number of linkages for data exchange, and phase 2 will be carried out this October focusing on implementation of reporting functions, clinical decision supports and specific functions for PMTCT and pediatric."

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For further information regarding the HIS integration project in HCMC, and specifically the pilot of MPI and OPC/EMR, please contact.

1) Pham Viet Long, technical coordinator, I-TECH (phamvietlong@itech-vietnam.org)
2) Nguyen Van Tam, M&E chief, HCMC PAC (thaytam@yahoo.com)
3) Nguyen Tuan Anh, applications development manager, CDC (nguyenat@vn.cdc.gov)

What this Blog is about

Jan Flowers from UW I-TECH here with a brief note about why we set up this blog for the HCMC PAC eHealth project and what we intend to use the blog for.

I-TECH (a unit of the Department of Global Health, University of Washington) is working with CDC and the Clinton Health Access Initiative to support the HCMC Provincial AIDS Committee (PAC) to implement an overall eHealth Architecture in the PAC health care facilities in Ho Chi Minh City.

Why Blog?

We've become rather enthusiastic about the idea of keeping a public, transparent log of our progress.  It seems counter-intuitive for most people to announce when things go wrong, or we hit a slow patch, but we found it's been helpful with our OpenELIS project in Haiti and Cote d'Ivoire, and our work in Kenya on OpenMRS, because it gives people a way to get oriented to what we're doing, to figure out how it relates to what they're doing, it exposes points for collaboration, and it lets the sponsors of our work know that we're working hard and getting things done.

As a quick introduction / overview, read on --

The main objective of the project has been to 1) share information across facilities and services for continuity of care, and 2) deduplicate patients to improve the management of the overall program.  The strategy to meet this objective is to implement electronic health information systems where needed and to develop standards-based interoperability sharing data between systems.

An important goal as part of this project is local ownership by the PAC for sustainability after the funding for this project has ended.  To meet this goal, we have chosen to use open source software as the foundation to develop systems that meet the needs of the PAC.  This gives the PAC access to all code used within their architecture without any licensing restrictions or fees for use and modification.

The first phase of this project has been to develop:

1. an MPI as the master database for patient identification, including fingerprints, identifiers, and demographics
2. an EMR for use in the HIV outpatient clinics (OPC) using the open source platform OpenMRS
3. Standards-based interoperability for patient identification and information retrieval between the MPI, the existing VCT clinics, and the OPC EMR, and,
4. a consolidated database of patients to be housed at the PAC for records backup, patient transfer, and program reporting

Back to the intended use of the blog -- 

This blog is intended to provide a log of the projects progress, challenges, technical issues, and approaches taken and solutions found.  

Our technical coordinator, Mr. Long, will post weekly status reports to inform stakeholders of the progress being made each week, intended scope of work for the next week, and any issues we are facing.

Our development partners will post their technical issues, which our development team within I-TECH and collaborators in OpenMRS can reply to with ideas for solving.  

Lastly, we will post when updates to documentation is made for stakeholders to view and comment on.

Please send us any feedback on this blog, the project, or otherwise!

Kind regards,

Jan