The Charity's founder and chair, Dr. Peter Smith, is heading to Uganda at the end of this week for a whistle stop tour of six remote clinics to check on the progress of our pioneering electronic medical records system, which he helped set up there as part of 'Project Connect'.

The project has enabled the clinics to keep electronic medical records for thousands of patients, and to submit those records directly to health bosses at Uganda’s Health Ministry. It is a scheme that can enable rapid tracking of outbreaks of infectious diseases such as Ebola – potentially saving countless lives by stopping disease spreading.

The clinics were previously relying on handwritten medical records - records that can took weeks to be sent to the Health Ministry in Kampala and then weeks more to collate.

The clinics were previously relying on handwritten medical records - records that can took weeks to be sent to the Health Ministry in Kampala and then weeks more to collate.

Our Outreach electronic records system (EMR) now allows this process to be done can in hours rather than weeks and saves huge amounts of paper too!! This means the quicker an outbreak is recognised, the faster actions can be taken to stop it spreading, the more lives can be saved.

Up to a million people in Africa die every year due to simple medical errors such as prescribing the wrong drugs – errors that medical records can prevent. It is estimated that our Outreach EMR system saves 250 lives a year in the 23 clinics where it operates. If we were in more clinics, we could save even more lives.

While Peter is in Uganda he will visit officials at the Ugandan Ministry of Health. He hopes to persuade them to allow Outreach EMR to roll out its system to hundreds more clinics in remote areas of Uganda.

Come back to read more Blogs about his visit soon.