eHealth TABLET: A Developing Country
Perspective in Managing the Development and
Deployment of a Mobile - Cloud Electronic
Medical Record for Local Government Units
Ma. Regina Estuar
School of Science and
Engineering
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
restuar@ateneo.edu
Dennis Batangan
Institute of Philippine Culture
Philippines
dennis.batangan@gmail.com
Andrei Coronel
School of Science and
Engineering
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
acoronel@ateneo.edu
Francisco Enrique Vicente Castro
School of Science and
Engineering
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
fgcastro@ateneo.edu
Anna Christine Amarra
Ateneo Java Wireless
Competency Center
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
camarra@ateneo.edu
Rose Ann Camille Caliso
Institute of Philippine Culture
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
rcaliso@ateneo.edu
John Paul Vergara
School of Science and
Engineering
Ateneo de Manila University
Philippines
jpvergara@ateneo.edu
Abstract—In January 2013, the eHealth TABLET (Technol-
ogy Assisted Boards for Local government unit Efficiency and
Transparency) project began with a two-fold objective of: 1)
creating a tablet based system that will integrate existing health
information systems to address the national objective of a unified
health information management system by 2015 and 2) to create
a transparency layer at the local government units such that
communication lines between municipal health officers and the
mayor are monitored. Bottom up approach was used to ensure
that all features requested by multi-stakeholders are included
in the design of the system. The end product was a mobile -
web based system with the mobile application having three main
components: the electronic medical record (EMR) application
which comprises of the patient record and diagnosis module, the
requests/approval application, and the dashboard application for
data visualization. Responding to the needs of intended users,
the web based application provides the following features: web
auxiallry entry, aggregated disease report application and usage
monitoring . Regular usage monitoring increased usage over
time. For ICT development projects in public health, iteratve
involvement of multi-stakeholders is necessary to ensure higher
acceptance and adoption. From a design perspective, technologies
should be designed to be interoperable such that interfacing with
existing systems will be seamless.
I. I NTRODUCTION
The national eHealth Framework of the Philippine govern-
ment calls for the interfacing of several existing systems and
databases in order to achieve its goal of unification. As of this
writing, there are over 50 information systems related to health
with around 5 systems directly being used by local government
units in their health centers and barangays. However, the prob-
lem is that data redundancy exists because existing systems,
having the same patients, do not speak with one another. With
this premise, we began exploring the possibility of creating a
tablet based system which will interface with existing systems
such that there is only one data entry point. To address the
issue of efficiency, the proposed system was designed to use
web and cloud services so that real time health data can
be accessed anytime and anywhere. In January 2013, the
eHealth Technology Assisted Boards for Local Government
Unit and Transparency (eHealth TABLET) project began with
the objective of designing and implementing a tablet based
electronic medical record system for municipal health officers
as well as a transparency communication module between the
Mayor and the health officer. After one year, eTABLET has
been deployed in 10 municipalities nationwide with over 7000
health records after a 6 month deployment timeframe. This
paper discusses management in three perspectives: design,
development and deployment of a mobile - web application
within the context of developing countries where low cost but
high adoption and acceptance solutions are relevant.
II. RELATED LITERATURE
Public health delivery has been evidently improved with the
employment of Information and Communications Technology
(ICT) in the systems and processes of the health sector [1].
Through ICT-enabled health sector services, geographic and fi-
nancial barriers of delivering health-related needs to the public
are minimized. This is especially true for developing countries
where healthcare systems face inefficiencies and relatively
high transaction costs [2]. In particular, the implementation of
2014 IEEE 15th International Conference on Mobile Data Management
978-1-4799-5705-7/14 $31.00 © 2014 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MDM.2014.44
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