Photo Credit: USAID/Albania   Dr. Ajet Veleshnja stand in front of some of his recent training certificates and discusses his hopes for the future of the small, rural clinic in Lapardha.

Technology Boosts Healthcare as Doctors Focus on Prevention

Technology Boosts Healthcare as Doctors Focus on Prevention
Rural Clinic Provides Quality Health Care to Local Population

LAPARDHA--Dr. Ajet Veleshnja is high-tech for a general practitioner in rural Albania. He uses a laptop to keep track of his patients’ records, and he recently invested in ultrasound equipment that allows him to diagnose all sorts of ailments.

“We should not just focus on the curative,” said Dr. Veleshnja, echoing the sentiment behind a USAID project that strengthens primary health care through Albania. The effort aims to empower general practitioners (GPs) and refocus their work from curative to preventative care.

In the years since communism collapsed in Albania, health care centers have suffered. Doctors fell behind on medical techniques, equipment became obsolete, and record keeping was poor. At the same time, more specialists started practices, drawing patients who believe that specialists provide better care. Patients also try to save money by only going to a doctor once, when they are sickest. This has skewed the health care system, and largely demoralized GPs.

Since 2001, USAID has been trying to improve the system.

Now, GPs like Dr. Veleshnja have been trained in record keeping, case management, and budgeting. In a health center in downtown Berat, a city about an hour’s drive from Lapardha, a simple switch from a walk-in system to one of appointments has made a big difference in the doctors’ efficiency, said Dr. Donika Papa.

The center also has new practice guidelines, and new record keeping forms that are designed to make disease prevention easier, and a new health information system, Dr. Papa said.

All visits to the clinic are recorded and stored in a software program developed by USAID. Based on monthly reports generated from this data, GPs can track the types of illnesses diagnosed, treated, and referred to hospitals. Reports are prominently displayed in every clinic, and doctors and nurses from the region meet monthly to evaluate their performance statistics.

In Berat, these reports helped doctors identify an alarming incidence of hypertension, linked to smoking and, possibly, a genetic predisposition.

With the data, local health officials designed an awareness campaign highlighting the dangers of smoking, and justified a request to the Ministry of Health for more antibiotics to treat inflammations.

In March, the Ministry of Health took the health information system nationwide. It had previously been active in only four regions as a USAID pilot project.

“We have changed many things in the way we are working, which has a big impact on how we manage patients,” Dr. Papa said.