Information systems for monitoring the burden of chronic diseases in public reference health facilities in Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern DRC

Chronic diseases are an increasingly important cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. Diseases such as cancer, diabetes and arterial hypertension remained for years in the background, in the shadow of pandemics such as malaria, HIV / AIDS and tuberculosis. In the past 6 years, 4 reference hospitals of Kisangani, Bukavu, Kigali and Bujumbura implemented hospital information systems enabling sophisticated analysis of the diagnostic variance of out-patient visits and in-patient admissions. Important volumes of chronic disease data have been collected in a period between 2006 and 2012, demonstrating that the problem of chronic diseases also grows rapidly in the Great Lakes region and therefore urgent steps must be taken, both by governments (Rwanda, DRC and Burundi), by the international donor community and by local hospital boards.