HILS Dissertation Defense: Describing Documentation of EHRs in Anti-Retroviral Therapy Clinics to Improve Healthcare Processes in Malawi

In healthcare, documentation deals with recording all patient encounters within a healthcare system.  Documentation has evolved from paper-based tools to electronic means, such as Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems.  The EHR brings opportunities to optimize healthcare processes by facilitating communication, offering decision support and allocating and distributing resources to health facilities for patient care.  Faced with the Human Immunodeficiency Viruses that leads to the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) pandemic, Malawi embraced an EHR for its Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) clinics since 2006.  The 90 - 90 - 90 HIV/AIDS eradication strategy which Malawi adopted with the World Health Organization (WHO) United Nations against AIDS (UNAIDS) may benefit from this EHR. The EHR benefits rely on the availability of good data quality, which has been lacking in other similar settings, including Malawi.  This concept has not been followed in many data quality assessments, particularly in Low-Income Countries (LICs). I asked the following research question: How can the varying purposes of EHR data use for different stakeholders inform interventions for EHR data quality improvement?