Recommendations for Enhancing Offline Functionality to ensure Information Availability in South African Public Electronic Health Information Systems

The offline functionality in health information systems poses a risk to the availability of health information due to various challenges. Patient files can easily be lost, duplicated, or unavailable for healthcare professionals due to corrupt virtual machines, faulty hard drives, viruses, and theft of digital gadgets. This can result in the need to recreate files, leading to potential data loss affecting information availability. This paper provides recommendations for addressing challenges impacting information availability in the offline functionality of South African electronic health information systems through a scoping review. This was done using the following academic databases: ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, and search engines such as Google. The scoping review resulted in 26 papers and suggested measures such as system design and resilience, data synchronisation and integrity, uninterrupted power supply, secure local data storage and reliable ICT infrastructure for public healthcare facilities.