Electronic Health Records for Improved Data Sharing during Patient’s Mobility across Namibian Public Hospitals

Healthcare services are heterogeneous due to the different healthcare professionals providing them. Thus, patients often move from one healthcare facility to another, both within and outside the country in search of improved care. During the process of a patient’s mobility, patient’s health records need to be shared among the concerned healthcare professionals. In Namibia, sharing of data during patient’s mobility continues to be a challenge across healthcare facilities as there are no electronic health records in place for patient’s records management. Patients moving between healthcare facilities manually carry their medical files to the facilities. Consequently, the manual process of sharing patient’s data negatively impacts services delivery efficiency and effectiveness as data is not always timely, medical files get misplaced or stolen. Due to these challenges, there is a need for healthcare facilities in Namibia to implement electronic health records as an approach to manage and mitigate data sharing challenges during patient’s mobility. It is worth noting that data protection and patients’ consent is a necessity for data sharing and thus the need for legal frameworks supporting patient’s privacy and confidentiality. A qualitative study was conducted to find out how electronic health records can be used to enable patient’s data sharing across healthcare facilities. Data was gathered through semi-structured interviews and interpretively analysed. Based on the findings a model to guide the realisation of electronic health records for patient’s data sharing is developed.