Current Status of e-Health in Burkina Faso

The term e-health refers to all areas where information and communication technologies (ICT) are used for health. E-health appears more and more as a relevant solution to meet the challenges health systems are facing. However, despite its interest, e-health has long remained underexploited in Burkina Faso even if many softwares have been the subject of investments in hospitals as part of a modernization of administrative operations, which does not directly contribute to the quality of care. Hospital information systems (HIS) are the foundation on which e-health is based. They organize, at the IT level, the exchange of information between departments within the same hospital. It is on those systems that the shared medical record (SMR) is based. In this paper, we present an inventory of the implementation of e-health in Burkina Faso. We collected data on hospital information systems deployed in major hospitals in Burkina Faso. Then we analyzed the level of interoperability of those hospital information systems and we finally proposed an interoperability approach adapted to Burkina Faso.