A US-based company DiagnosisONE, established by an expatriate Pakistani, has developed Pakistan Public Health Information Network (PakPHIN), which is the world’s most advanced Integrated Disease Surveillance System, in order to help health authorities and care providers to address communicable diseases, chronic and acute care diseases and even accidents and injuries in the country.
Talking to selected journalists at a local hotel, DiagnosisONE, CEO, Dr Mansoor Khan said Pakistani healthcare system, perhaps more than many other healthcare systems, suffered from a series of systematic shortcomings; these include lack of appropriate follow-up, significant duplication of services utilization, an inability to perform surveillance (both of communicable diseases and of preventable errors) as well as virtual non-existence of any records relating to patient outcomes. “To help rectify these shortcomings, this integrated disease surveillance system, called Pakistan Public Health Information Network, has been designed, which will satisfy the needs of resource poor environments typically found in Asia, Africa and South America. Dr Mansoor Khan said this system enabled a country to streamline the creation, collection and analysis of health information at all levels within a country. It is capable of supporting the creation, collection and analysis of data from all possible conditions South America. Dr Mansoor Khan said this system enabled a country to streamline the creation, co
diagnostic tests (lab as well as radiology), procedures and medications. He said this turnkey system is a highly scalable, multi-tier system designed to support hundreds of millions of patients over thousands of nodes across the country. He said this system consisted of a series of modules that were deployed at the federal, provincial, district and local levels. At the federal level, authorities use code servers and control what data the system will allow to be collected by selecting a set of codes from a library of all possible codes thus defining the master code set. They can also collect and analyze data from all provincial and peripheral locations.
At the provincial level, authorities use report servers that collect data from the set of locations subject to the control of the specific report server at their location and analyze that data as well as export that data to epidemiological analysis systems and to the code servers.
Finally at the district and local levels, authorities use the Disease Reporting Module that is part of the Medical Record Server to collect disease data, and care providers (clinics, labs and hospitals) use the e-logbook to manage clinical data as part of their daily business and export reportable disease data to the appropriate Report Server. The application provides reporting at all levels, for instance, the basic health unit is able to run reports specific to that unit, the district hospital is able to analyze data from all hospitals in that district and provincial and federal authorities can run province-wide and countrywide reports.
A particular strength of this system is the ability to collect laboratory data, integrate it with patient data and then analyze this data to generate alerts and recommendations for both the public health personnel and for the care provider, using our clinical decision support system. This set of systems then forms PakPHIN-the world’s most advanced Integrated Disease Surveillance System. A key benefit of this system to the Ministry of Health will be the ability to apply for large grants and clinical research and trials that require an integrated nationwide infrastructure to be in place.
He informed that, in collaboration with federal government and Ministry of Health, this system would initially be installed in Mayo Hospital, Lahore, Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, and Poly Clinic, Islamabad as a pilot project. Then, he added that this system would be rolled out nationwide for collecting data disease surveillance, particularly 16 communicable diseases known worldwide.
Like in India, he said that it would also be very essential to start a mandatory Healthcare IT course after completion of MBBS in medical colleges in Pakistan so that the next generation of doctors was able to effectively implement this integrated disease surveillance system in the country. “We have just to design the course outlines, as all tools of this system are ready,” he added.
He said the government needed to step up and help establish relevant infrastructure and allocate funds for making this system functional in the country. “Pakistan can’t afford to miss the opportunity to bring its level of healthcare delivery system at par with the international standards. We have an opportunity to leapfrog in healthcare,” he added. He said it would take a year or so to establish this disease surveillance system, depending on the priorities of the government, adding it would not put financial burden on the government either because international donor agencies were ready to fund healthcare initiatives worldwide.
During his current visit, he said he would meet with the authorities of Ministry of Health in Islamabad as well as Higher Education Commission (HEC) Chairman Dr Atta-ur-Rehman for implementing the system in the country.