With the prevalence of breast cancer cases, Health Minister Dr. Christopher Tufton has announced that Jamaica has received a technological boost through the National Cancer Registry for data collection and reporting on incidents. This will aid with prevention and control strategies.

While speaking in Parliament, he noted that Jamaica has become the second country in the world but the first in the region – to use the Health Information Management Platform District Health Information Software Version 2.

This is an open-source, web-based platform most commonly used as a health management information system.

Dr. Tufton said “We are improving the digitisation process or infrastructure to capture data in this instance on cancer diagnosed throughout the country in order to use that data for better analytics to understand the problem, to determine where it may be happening more than other places, to determine a response, to engage in prevention methods to the extent that we can. And this will augur well for the fight against this very terrible disease that afflicts us.”

The installation, customisation, and use of an oncology module using the software will be managed by the Health Ministry.