The eGovernment strategy for the Kingdom of Bahrain is focused on ensuring effective delivery of government services to citizens, residents and businesses (customers). The eGovernment strategy is summed up by:

“Delivering Customer Value through Collaborative Government”

The eGovernment vision for Bahrain is stated as follows:

To be an eGovernment leader committed to provide government services that are integrated, best-in-class and available to all through their channel of choice, thus transforming Bahrain into the best place in GCC to visit, do business with or live and work in.

Based on the feedback done by eGovernment from the citizens / residents, health-related services have come out amongst the most important public service, and also as a service where improvement is desired. To facilitate the MoH services, a seamless integration of all public health facilities maintaining health records for all patients and an online interface is required.

The Ministry of Health has embarked on an elaborate plan of internal computerization and automation which encompasses some of the services that are a part of the eHealth services project.

Benefits envisaged from this project are:

• Cost savings for the government through reduced duplication of effort, speeding patient treatment, improving safety
• Single patient view for clinics that can be leveraged across multiple departments to increase productivity, streamline processes and maintain compliance
• Instantaneous retrieval of information by clinics from other institutions – even during consultations with a patient - without having to log into a separate system
• Elimination of error instances (clinics not having access to either the latest drug formulae or the complete medication history of the patient) in the current manual prescribing process, causing time delays for patients in getting the right medication

Priority Service Coverage

Implementation of eHealth Services will electronically enable the following services:

• Results of laboratory and radiology tests
• Provisioning of electronic health record
• Issue of birth certificate
• Issue of death certificate
• Students registration for CHS
• Licensure for medical practitioners, nurses & allied health
• Licensure for food shops and other health-related organizations
• Issue and renewal of licenses for clinics and medical centres
• Registration of pharmacies and renewal
• Others

Ministry of Health aims to provide choice of channels to citizens so that they may access services as convenient to their situation. One of the Government targets by 2010 is to launch a mobile gateway to introduce mGovernment (mobile government) in cooperation with the ministries.

The key drivers for a Mobile Gateway delivering electronic services are:

• Customer preference
• Aim to become a leader in eGovernment using cutting edge technology
• High mobile penetration in the Kingdom
• Convenience in getting information on the move

Desired outcomes for eGovernment:

• Convenience for customers
• Reduction in cost of service population
• Anytime, anywhere access to information and select public services

Recently the Ministry of Health implemented the Short Messaging Services (SMS) in the eBooking Appointments for Pre-employment as one of the delivery channels, and this deliver channel will be expanded by other e-services in the near future.

E-Government Group:

• Dr. Fawzi Abdulla Amin
  Assistant Under-Secretary for Training and Planning
  Head of Group
  


• Mr. Ebrahim Ali Al-Nawakhda
  Director of Health Information Directorate
  Deputy Head
  


• Mrs. Manal Ahmed Ali
  Senior Computer System Analyst
  Member
  


• Mrs. Maban Mohammed Mansoori
  Senior Computer System Analyst
  Member
  


• Mr. Hasan Ahmed Ali
  Computer System Analyst
  Member