The Kenya Association for the Welfare of People with Epilepsy [KAWE] is a non-profit making organization that comprehensively targets and addresses issues of people with Epilepsy. Through a community participatory approach, KAWE is committed to addressing the needs of people living with epilepsy in a holistic and integrated manner. KAWE currently has 3 owned and 26 affiliated epilepsy Clinics, the organization aims to have 80 Epilepsy Clinics.
Work on moving KAWE from paper based data collection to a digital system began by first extending or customizing an existing legacy patient management system to include an Epilepsy module because that is the organization’s core business. Though the system was good in capturing medical records, over a few months some shortcomings we’re noted on the legacy system, such as invoicing, billing, basically some crucial functionality touching on finances module was lacking.
A prototype of Clinical Data Management Solutions (CDMS) had already been developed much earlier and incidentally work was under way to revamp it and make it usable in a real life situation, we saw this as the perfect opportunity to showcase CDMS and try it out with KAWE. We began by again carefully collecting and understanding the KAWE’s user needs followed by mapping the processes and then customizing CDMS to accommodate the services provided by the organization.
Obviously with transition to a new system we had to factor in migration of data for smooth workflow and easy access of historical patient data – after all health is an information business we cannot treat patients effectively if we cannot access their history. To achieve this migration we set off by developing web APIs to share all patient data between the legacy cloud server Microsoft SQL database and the CDMS target MySQL database, the target system “consumed” the data which we then thoroughly tested before deployment. This process was not a one time or overnight success as we needed to perform several iterations and adjustments to get things right.
Having migrated all the data we then performed training of end users to familiarize them with the new system and make sure they we’re comfortable with the flow, any final adjustments or requirements that came up we’re quickly done and implemented.
After testing the imported data we embarked on report development to provide crucial data for decision making and program management, new reports we’re created that we’re previously not available on the legacy system.