Kawempe National Referral Hospital
Women and Children | Uganda
Laboratory digitisation at Uganda's referral hospital for women and children, and the country's highest-reporting connected transfusion analyser.
The challenge
Kawempe is Uganda's national referral hospital for women and children, which means obstetric haemorrhage, neonatal sepsis and paediatric emergencies, all of them time-critical and many of them needing blood. Transfusion serology in particular was producing good results on the analyser and then relying on somebody to carry them, on paper, to whoever was waiting.
What MedX did
MedX digitised the laboratory end to end and connected the instruments, including the transfusion analyser, through MedX Automation. Results are delivered into the record as they complete, and the install reports its own status centrally, so a machine that stops sending is noticed rather than discovered.
Background
Kawempe National Referral Hospital serves women and children, with one of the highest delivery volumes in the country. Its laboratory was digitised with the National Health Laboratory and Diagnostic Services alongside the other national referral hospitals.
The highest-reporting connected transfusion analyser in Uganda
Kawempe's Echo Lumena has delivered 10,012 resultsinto the system and was still reporting as of June 2026, more than any other connected site in the national blood-safety baseline. That matters beyond the hospital: because each install reports its status, those results are visible centrally, which is how a national view of transfusion testing exists at all.
- Results leave the analyser over its own protocol, with no transcription step.
- Each delivery is tracked until the receiving system confirms it.
- Work carries on through a network outage and goes out on reconnect.
What else we connected
- Laboratory workflow end to end, from reception through worksheets and quality control to sign-off.
- Bidirectional exchange with EAFYA EMR for orders and results.
- Automated reporting to HMIS and DHIS2.
- ISO 15189 quality framework, shared with the other referral hospitals.
Results
- 10,012 transfusion results reported off connected equipment, the highest of any site in the country.
- Still reporting as of June 2026, years after commissioning.
- No transcription between the analyser and the record.
Impact
For a hospital whose emergencies are obstetric and neonatal, the difference between a result on the analyser and a result in the record is measured in minutes that matter. Kawempe closed that gap, and in doing so became the strongest single source of transfusion data in Uganda's connected network.
Part of the national referral programme
This deployment is one of four. In partnership with the National Health Laboratory and Diagnostic Services, MedX digitised the laboratories of Uganda's national referral hospitals from 2024, each on the same platform and the same standards, so a result means the same thing whichever of them produced it.
- Kiruddu, general medicine and surgery.
- Kawempe, women and children.
- Mulago Specialised Women and Neonatal, maternal and neonatal care.
- Butabika, mental health.
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