Design and implementation of a clinical laboratory information system in a low-resource setting.

Background: Reducing laboratory errors presents a significant opportunity for both cost reduction and healthcare quality improvement. This is particularly true in low-resource settings where laboratory errors are further exacerbated by poor infrastructure and shortages in a trained workforce. Informatics interventions can be used to address some of the sources of laboratory errors.

PMTCT Option B+ Does Not Increase Preterm Birth Risk and May Prevent Extreme Prematurity: A Retrospective Cohort Study in Malawi.

Objective: To estimate preterm birth risk among infants of HIV-infected women in Lilongwe, Malawi, according to maternal antiretroviral therapy (ART) status and initiation time under Option B+.

Design: A retrospective cohort study of HIV-infected women delivering at ≥27 weeks of gestation, April 2012 to November 2015. Among women on ART at delivery, we restricted our analysis to those who initiated ART before 27 weeks of gestation.

Developing a point-of-care electronic medical record system for TB/HIV co-infected patients: experiences from Lighthouse Trust, Lilongwe, Malawi.

Background: Implementation of user-friendly, real-time, electronic medical records for patient management may lead to improved adherence to clinical guidelines and improved quality of patient care. We detail the systematic, iterative process that implementation partners, Lighthouse clinic and Baobab Health Trust, employed to develop and implement a point-of-care electronic medical records system in an integrated, public clinic in Malawi that serves HIV-infected and tuberculosis (TB) patients.

Methods: Baobab Health Trust, the system developers, conducted a series of technical and clinical meetings with Lighthouse and Ministry of Health to determine specifications.

Using touchscreen electronic medical record systems to support and monitor national scale-up of antiretroviral therapy in Malawi.

Gerry Douglas and colleagues describe the rationale and their experience with scaling up electronic health records in six antiretroviral treatment sites in Malawi.

A comparison of data captured at point of care versus data captured retrospectively.

Electronic data systems are being implemented in resource-poor HIV clinics to track and improve patient care. The great majority of these systems rely on paper forms and retrospective data entry, while a few have chosen to deploy point-of-care systems to collect data in real time. This study describes a comparison of data quality between these two approaches.