Relevance of Electronic Health Records in Upscaling Health Outcomes in Health Facilities in Bamenda, Cameroon

In an age of increasing digitization, every profession seeks to contextualize the applicability of digital technologies. Digitization is the process of transforming hard information into a language of 0s and 1s, readable by digital devices. Africa, despite the numerous challenges, is improving the adoption of digital communication as more people come to understand its benefits in social and professional life, such as healthcare, education, management, religion and culture. Numerous challenges in patient management in health facilities are related to the poor or absence of health information system, including electronic health records. Some of the challenges include: inconsistencies and errors in medical follow-up, untimely tracking of disease outbreak, disordered manual files that makes retrieval cumbersome, risk of information loss in verbal communication among health teams and with patients, verbal violence in the populated urban health facilities. This paper therefore aims at exploring the effectiveness of electronic health records (EHR) in health facilities of the Archdiocese of Bamenda (Cameroon) as a factor for improving healthcare outcomes. The objectives of this research paper are to investigate the factors that favour the usage of electronic health records in Bamenda, the importance of monitoring health outcomes in public health and the contribution of electronic health records in stabilizing healthcare outcomes. The methodology of non-participant observation, survey and secondary sources was applied. The diffusion of innovation and action-network theories were employed in the study. The population consisted of staff from the two campuses of the St. Blaise hospitals in the North West Region of Cameroon. The hospitals were chosen using the purposive sampling and the 60 respondents, by stratified random sampling technique. The instrument for data collection was a structured questionnaire. The instrument was tested by content validity and the Cronbach’s alpha correlation coefficient whereby the result was 0.77, which provided the basis for the instruments reliability. Simple description statistics of mean and standard deviation were employed. The findings, among others showed that electronic health records can enhance treatment outcomes, such as overall clinical wellness of the population, socio-economic stability and disease control. The paper recommended that healthcare policy makers, practitioners and governance structures should invest in learning and procurement of infrastructures for producing electronic health records in order to ensure a holistic healthy population.