Assessment of the usability of sage L500 in the management of Pharmaceutical Information System

Abstract

Background: Pharmaceutical information system is a branch of Health information system aimed at enabling production of quality data to support decision making. In some countries especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, the medicine supply system are often unreliable and therefore do not guarantee regular supply of these essential medicines. This developing world has shown constrains related to routine health information system performance at the country-level which include poor data quality; limited use of available information; weaknesses in how data are analyzed; and poor information management practice. Although Rwanda integrated Information Technology in all spheres of the country life including health sector, to date there is scarce information on how the system is used in drugs management and report production. This is why there is a need to explore challenges related to information management systems in place thereby avoiding Stock outs, overstock and expiry of drugs. Methods: The staff at RBC/MPPD actively involved in information management was part of the participants of this crossectional qualitative study design which was employed to meet the objectives of the present study. Results: Across all the eighteen interviewees, the respondents said that they use SAGE L500 as tool to manage pharmaceutical products. All respondents in their respective units indicated that this software itself cannot process all information necessary to provide direct reports. Discussion: The study highlighted that the use of SAGE L500 is crucial especially for essential medicines and highly active anti-retroviral therapy drugs management. The use of the system was reported by most of the interviewees to impacted positively on drug management in RBC/MPPD and suggested to upgrade and customize SAGE L500 so that it can cover all steps of supply chain in a warehouse and enable direct generation of reports without exporting data to other software for data analysis. Recommendation: To invest more in pharmaceutical information management systems to strengthen the existing ones and come up with the solutions to the raised suggestions by the users.