UgandaEMR is a facility-level electronic medical system designed to support data management for HIV programs and other health services.
METS is mandated to support PEPFAR Implementing Partners ensure submission of quality National and PEPFAR reports, and this involves development, upgrading, testing, piloting, and roll-out systems that can support generation of complete, timely and accurate data.
In line with this, METS in collaboration with Ministry of Health – AIDS Control Program (MOH-ACP), and USAID-SITES embarked on upgrading the EMR to allow real time and retrospective entry of data at all HIV testing service points within a facility (HTS Solution). This is expected to greatly improve the provision of HIV Testing Services, support timely data capture, and aid timely clinical decision making.
METS in partnership with CDC and USAID implementing partners conducted an HTS solution follow-on activity. The M&E team was following up on program issues (how much HTS data has been entered, what are the challenges, plans for scale up away from the pilot facilities) and the developers team was upgrading the UgandaEMR system to version 3.3.10 which had improvements to the HTS solution having received feedback from the initiation phase in August 2022. METS conducted on site mentorships for the IPs technical team’s on how to conduct the upgrade and provided troubleshooting tips in case of errors
The roll-out was conducted between 9th – 20th January 2023 and involved conducting IP and district entry meetings, site selection and assessment of 140 PEPFAR supported health facilities (70 CDC & 70 USAID/DOD).
This involved creating awareness to the District Health Teams, orientation of system users as well as collecting on-site feedback on the usability of the upgraded HTS Solution.
Currentlyover 300 site staff have been oriented in the upgraded system and there is significant use of the system in all the 140 facilities. Additional modifications were performed to meet user expectations, documented experiences and lessons learned and capacity of implementing partner teams was built to support further roll-out of the upgraded system to additional PEPFAR supported HTS sites.
The roll-out has already registered results and among them is improved user capability to enter all required HTS data at the various data entry points, elimination of double counting during report generation. Additionally, an HTS dashboard is now available and displays real-time HTS results and the upgraded HTS Solution now enables generation of KP/PP HTS indicators.
Identified best practices
Next Steps
- Implementing Partners to support roll-out of the upgraded HTS Solution to additional PEPFAR supported HTS sites.
- Roll-out of an HTS Mobile Application that will enable off-site HTS data capture.
- HTS Focal Persons to ensure functionality of the upgraded HTS Solution, timely data capture and HTS report generation.
