Stre@mline Testimonials: Villa Maria Hospital, Masaka.

Villa Maria Hospital is a Private not for-Profit medical facility of the Hospital level located in Kalungu District, Central Uganda. The 140-bed capacity hospital was established in 1902 and has been operating for the past 120 years owned by Masaka Catholic Diocese under the UCMB umbrella.

On average, the hospital serves about 70 patients daily in both OPD and IPD with a full commitment to providing excellent medical care to the people of Kalungu, Masaka, Bukomansimbi, Sembabule, and the neighboring districts.

The hospital established a community health insurance scheme which has been running for 2 years with about 1000 members and has plans of onboarding other insurance providers to expand coverage and provide affordable health care to more patients. The hospital operates both OPD and IPD

Challenges

For over its 120 years of existence, Villa Maria Hospital of Kalungu, Masaka has predominantly based its operations on paper-based systems. According to the medical director Dr. Ssemwanga Edward, this system had not given them the desired flexibility and efficiency required to propel their hospital forward. He highlights that the hospital struggled with a number of areas but majorly highlights the following:

• Patient records management and retrieval: Accessing old patient records and storing new ones was not only hard but very costly after existing for such a time and serving an average of 70 patients daily. Failure to retrieve patient records negatively affected the quality of follow-up care given to patients.
• Finance tracking, management, and reporting: Tracking of debts, part payments, daily cash sales, Community health insurance premium payments, and utilization has been challenging with the old systems as these functionalities are not available. It is also suspected that cashiers would go away with up to UGX 60,000 of untracked cash per day causing losses to the hospital?
• Drugs and sundries management had been tracked in Quick books which was an independent system that would be used by the doctors so, communication with the clinical teams was difficult, making it hard to monitor stockouts, expired drugs, and also leakages through stolen drugs in some departments. The Medical director further confesses that some of his staff were guilty of drug theft.

Stre@mline actions

The Stre@mline team installed Stre@mline EMR at Villa Maria Hospital Premises on 28th November 2022 and trained up to 74 staff including Administrators, the finance team, and the clinical team over the following days till the 6th of December 2022.?

Villa Maria Hospital was able to set up its price lists, stock inventory, stock taking, finance, and Community Health Insurance on Stre@mline with the site going live on the 7th of December 2022.?

Results

As of 9th of December, 2022 (3 days after training), Villa Maria Hospital had already registered 151 patients on Stre@mline EMR averaging 76 patients daily. The stores and pharmacy team was able to service all ward requests for drugs and sundries and the finance team was able to bill clients on the go with its challenges or reports and cash drop leakages being closed out right from the start.