1 Towards Paperless Hospitals: Lessons Learned From 15 Health Facilities in Uganda Benjamin Kanagwa School of Computing and Informatics Technology Makerere University, P.O.BOX 7062, Kampala, Uganda bkanagwa@cis.mak.ac.ug Jenard Ntacyo, Sam Orach Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau P.O.BOX 2886, Kampala, Uganda jntacyo@ucmb.co.ug, sorach@ucmb.co.ug Abstract—In this paper we share and explore the key features we have found to be critical for different health facilities with regard to automation of hospital processes and Electronic Patient Records (EPR). We have deployed an Electronic Patient Record Man- agement System (EPRMS) in a total of 15 hospital facilities in Uganda albeit with varying levels of success. The goal was to create a paperless envi- ronment for a group of health facilities and pro- vide centralised support and training. We discuss automation approaches in these facilities and highlight the current experiences. The EPRMS is based on a heavily customized version of care2x called Helcare to support the unique challenges of hospitals in Uganda. The current deployments are limited to Outpatient Departments (OPD) with future plans to extend to Inpatients, Maternal and Child Health units and HIV/AIDS care centres among others. 1 I. I NTRODUCTION Manual hospital services are time consuming espe- cially during collating and coding of data for local government and national reporting requirements. Automation of hospital processes has seen increased 1 This work was funded by CORDAID cordaid.org as part of funding to UCMB under the Connect for Change Consortium (C4C) attempts in the recent years[14], [5] but most have been limited to billing and post-dated entry of aggregated data to support decision making with in the Hospitals. We have noticed that the use of EPR saves lots of effort for different facilities allowing them concentrate on the core activities of health service provision. Despite evidence that EPR is crucial in provision of quality medical services[9], most hospitals in Uganda are still manual. EPR and automation of hospital processes relate to the man- agement of hospital transactions including patients through capture and use of electronic data as the patient consumes services. Our approach was to capture all patient and moved to different service points. There is consensus that automation of hospital facilities can breed efficiency and improve pa- tient satisfaction[3]. Indeed Governments and Non- government Organisations are willing to invest in ICT-enabled Health care [10]. Several barriers that hinder implementation are highlighted by [10] and include the time involved for a practice to con- vert to EPRs from paper records, the training of health care professionals on the new systems, and computer literacy. Other challenges also include the