ABSTRACT
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is growing rapidly in Nigeria and has had a great effect on businesses and individuals. We can easily say ICT has not penetrated everywhere in the society. Nigeria comprises of 36 states and it is located in the western part of Africa. Nigeria has a population of about 158 million people. The three tiers (federal, state and local) of government share the responsibilities of providing adequate health services to the people.
This thesis will focus on why Nigeria Health sector have not being using ICT in their various health centers. The focus of the thesis is to transform from the paper based approach to electronic health records that will fasten data collection from multiple health centers.
An electronic health record (EHR) is an official health record for an individual that is shared among multiple facilities and agencies. Digitized health information systems are expected to improve efficiency and quality of care and, ultimately, reduce costs.
1 Introduction
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is growing rapidly in Nigeria and has had a great effect on businesses and individuals. We can easily say ICT has not penetrated everywhere in the society which is understandable due to many reasons. Without any doubt Internet is the fastest growing communication technology today (Dlodlo & Sithole, 2001). It took only four years for the internet to achieve the same mark as the television revolution, which took 13 years to reach 50 million viewers (Molosi, 2001).
Nigeria health sector has being disintegrating for years and have suffered due to negligence. One can easily say keeping records of an institution like the health sector is very important and crucial to the development of the sector as well as the patients. My study will focus on why the health sector is in its present state and what can be done to improve the sector. I will focus on the crossover from the paper based approach to an electronic means, which we can all say is more effective and efficient. In general Nigeria health sector has not fully utilized the benefits of ICT in the health sector and can be seen as backward development for a country that is adopting ICT rapidly. The patients records are normally stored on a paper which can either be misplaced or useless when visiting another health center. As we all know sloppiness can cause a great deal of damage to many things most importantly the health of an individual.
If there is a system in place that can be shared both by the private and public health center, there will be more improvement to the sector as well as the patient because it will fasten the treatment of diseases, understand what kind of medicine the patient is allergic to, what should be the next level of treatment, what drug was administered to the patient before and so on. By knowing all this, more lives will be saved as well as cost; it will increase the life span of the patient. In the system, there will be fully disclosed records of the patient in order to know the next step to take, what is the patient’s reaction to the medicine administered.
A country like Nigeria has some many diseases due to the environment, negligence, different seasons (dry and raining seasons), each season has its own illness and predicament. In various health centers across the country, there is no system in place where you can make appointment in advance which is really bad, it is just the matter of who comes first that is being used except cases of emergency. There is always a queue due to this fact and often leads to problem because doctors are much fewer than the patients. With a good system in place, the doctors can work effectively and can attend to more people in lesser time.
With the insurance claims always comes a problem because there is no concrete evidence that a patient has visited a clinic since there is no clear explanation or any records to show for it. There are various examples to back up the fact that Nigeria health sector needs an Information system to help improve results and save more lives in the process.
Sharing of the patient information can be best achieved through the use of a common database that can be provided by a Multi-tiered architecture; a server can use services from other servers in order to provide its own services. These will ensure that the data is reliable and can be shared among the various departments in the health care sector. The single data entry will ensure the consistency of the patient information and gives the appropriate users an edge and of course provides a more suitable system to manage their patient information. A lot of things can be managed through the system such as prescriptions, previous diagnosis, lab test, blood type, family diseases and so on. With the new system, the timeframe will be minimized and more lives will be saved.
The importance of this study is to show how the information communication technology (ICT) can help tremendously to achieve a better health care within few years and how they can expand their reach. The studies will emphasis on Nigeria health sector and ways in which they need to improve through the use of ICT.
Background Information
Nigeria comprises of 36 states and it is located in the western part of Africa. Nigeria has a population of about 158 million people. According to the United Nations, the population of Nigeria is expected to reach 258.5 million by 2050 (World Population