Physicians Report More Time for Patients with Digitized System

Maral Annaorazova is one of only four primary doctors at the Tuberculosis (TB) Prevention Center in Balkanabat, Turkmenistan. The demand on her time is great. The hospital regularly houses 90 in-patients (an average of 23 in her care) and doctors see an additional 60 patients (about 15 each) by appointment daily. In a modernized hospital, these conditions would be challenging but until last year, Annaorazova still worked in a medical facility where all the paperwork was completed by hand. Thanks to USAID-donated computers and IATP training last winter, a year later her workload has become more manageable and she is more satisfied with the patient care she now has the time to deliver.

Last September, the TB center in Balkanabat was the recipient of two computers from the USAID-funded Project Hope. Last winter, Annaorazova along with eight of her colleagues from the TB Center attended IATP training and studied the full range of equipment and software used in a modern hospital. Less than a year after Annaorazova and her colleagues completed IATP training, the Center now works with electronic patient registration templates, a digital patient database, electronic archives, and electronically composed documents and reports.

Annaorazova explains that before the digitization of the hospital’s routine paperwork and procedures, it was not uncommon for her to spend half of her day seeing appointments and filling out medical charts by hand. She reports that the paperwork alone consumed 10-15 percent of her day. “I could have used the precious time I spent filling reports out by hand, to see my patients and attend to their needs,” reports the doctor.

Thanks to an updated system, one of the health care administrators, Amanbagt Rahymova, has cut her workload by 80 percent. One of the two computers went to Rahymova’s office as she is primarily responsible for maintaining all hospital records, for maintaining the patient database, and for filing routine reports to central authorities. She was one of the IATP graduates of the computer basics and MS Office applications training. What used to take Rahymova an hour to do by hand, she reports, now takes her only ten minutes by computer. “Using MS Word and Excel has made my work so much more efficient. Now I have more time to fulfill other duties,” she reports.

Part of this saved time she spends assisting Pediatrician Annaorazova. Annaorazova notes that Rahymova assists her in her own paperwork which gives the physician almost twice as much time to spend caring for patients. “If I spent 25 minutes with a patient before, now I have more than 50 minutes to spend with them. For this, I am so grateful.”

But Annaorazova is the only doctor Rahymova has time to assist. The workloads of the three other physicians remain heavy. Rahymova suggests there is much more to be done and notes that once the facility can acquire more computers, at least one for each doctor, the impact will be four times as great for the hospital and its patients.

Rahymova goes on to envision computers at all eight of their village branches in the Balkan region with staff working themselves with a digitized system after being trained in ICT skills. Head of the TB hospital Kurban Tachliev says “IT training has had such a great impact on the hospital’s day-to-day functioning as well as our staff’s performance….I am waiting for the day we can equip our branches in the villages with computers and provide the doctors there with IT training. We would then be able to network our facilities and communicate so much more easily when exchanging information and reports.”

Over 40 medical professionals in Turkmenistan have participated in IATP training over the last year mastering computer basics and MS Office applications. Countrywide, 1,000 people in Turkmenistan have participated in over 3,300 IATP training courses since last September.

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Thanks for sharing information about Maral Annaorazova. Really I appreciate this doctor
she is a TB Specialist and doing very nice job
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