Browsing by Author "Egwar, Andrew Alunyu"

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    A Collaborative Curriculum Review Process: Applicability to Higher Education Institutions
    (51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2018) Egwar, Andrew Alunyu; Bwire, Felix; Arinaitwe, Irene; Male, Vincent; Mpirirwe, Hilda; Baguma, Kenneth; Kamukama, Ismail; Ndagire, Lillian; Nabukenya, Josephine
    Curriculum review is mandatory for all higher education institutions (HEIs). The process brings together different stakeholders’ expertise to evaluate and revise an existing curriculum, positioning the field of study within the current market and industry trends. Although this process is repetitive, it still remains complex, majorly due to divergent stakeholders’ interests, varying levels of expertise, uncertain activity paths and multiple desired outcomes. The paper thus presents a Collaborative Curriculum Review Process (ColCuRP) to support the review of varying curricula in HEIs. We followed a mixed research approach (design science and action research) to design and evaluate the ColCuRP. It underwent four iterations during its evaluation and proved to be successful regards reduction in time for the review process, and supporting the different teams of departmental faculty to review Bachelors, Post Graduate Diploma, Masters and PhD curricula, at four HEIs in Uganda. Moreover, the ColCuRP can be used by inexperienced facilitators.
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    A Conceptual Model for Adaptation of eHealth Standards by Low and Middle-Income Countries
    (11th Health Informatics in Africa Conference (HELINA 2018), 2018) Egwar, Andrew Alunyu; Nabukenya, Josephine
    Electronic health (ehealth) is the use of information and communication technology to support healthcare. It is used to driving efforts to achieve sustainable development goals (SDGs) particularly “good health and well-being for all”. Nonetheless, just like other technologies, ehealth has rapidly gained ground in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) although with scanty government intervention. In fact, governments in LMICs have only lately developed ehealth strategies.Much as ehealth offers the promise for improved and affordable healthcare and service delivery, its success is still dependent on the specifications (standards) to support interoperability and information exchange. Regrettably, standardization efforts in LMICs are greatly curtailed by resource constraints. We reviewed literature on ehealth standardisation in LMICs using four African countries as our case studies. The objective of the study was to explore the challenges of ehealth standards development and or adoption by LMICs and posit that adaptation of existing international ehealth standards is a better option for LMICs. Qualitative analysis was used to derive key themes.Our study findings indicate several challenges to ehealth standardization in LMICs including delayed standardisation efforts and unregulated penetration of ehealth, slight industry involvement, inadequate funding for the standardisation process, insufficient human resources, less to none participation in the international standards development process, and inadequate technical infrastructure for standards participation among others.This study recommends adaptation of international ehealth standards to local context of individual LMICs to help streamline both patient data and health information sharing. To achieve this, we developed the ehealth standards adaptation model. The model offers better opportunity to fast-track ehealth standardisation efforts in LMICs, as such creating an enabling platform for ehealth systems interoperability and support for health information exchange.
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    Towards Adoption of Standards for Communication Infrastructure/Technologies in Healthcare Systems in LMICs: Theories, Practice and Evaluation
    (In HEALTHINF, 2020) Egwar, Andrew Alunyu; Ssekibuule, Richard; Nabukenya, Josephine
    While electronic health offers great promise to improve healthcare in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), the communication infrastructure/technologies (CI/T) requires standards to improve the current state of none to limited interoperability. This study reviewed theories that inform the assessment of the health system’s readiness to adopt ehealth CI/T standards. The study involved a scoping review of published articles reporting adoption to the use of ICT, technologies, and standards in health. Articles published in English between 2012-2019 were identified through PubMed Central and Google Scholar. Also, grey literature from websites of WHO, standards development organisations and Uganda’s Ministry of Health were searched. Data extraction involved coding to identify key themes that inform the readiness of health systems to adopt standards for eHealth CI. Of the 3,817 published articles, only 32 met the inclusion criteria. 17 grey literature was also included in our discussion. Results identified determinants for eHealth CI/T and that concepts from the technology adoption theories can be used as metrics to assess readiness to adopt standards for ehealth CI/T. The metrics for drivers to adopt standards were higher than inhibitors in Uganda’s health system. The metrics will lead to the development of a readiness assessment framework.