A former Government Statistician, Dr
Grace Bediako, has observed that healthcare delivery in the country could
improve significantly, if Information and Communication Technology (ICT) was
used to generate data on patients for proper decision making.
She said the current situation where
data and personal records of patients were usually paper-based made it
difficult for proper planning, monitoring and evaluation of healthcare systems.
New Year School
Dr Bediako made the observation
yesterday when she chaired a symposium on the topic, “Data collection for
health; the role of ICT”, on the third day of the ongoing 67th Annual New Year
School and Conference at the University of Ghana, Legon.
Other topics discussed during the
day were: “Creating the enabling environment for ICT and health” and
“Leveraging ICT to improve reproductive health”.
Dr Bediako said data analysed in the
country’s health sector were sometimes untimely; usually incomplete and
inaccurate to be used for the purpose for which they were collected.
Data system
She called for concerted efforts to
include the use of ICT in health delivery, “if we want to be able to get the
quality of data, we need to improve healthcare delivery.”
The statistician further called on
all stakeholders in the health sector to harmonise their data systems to
improve on efficiency in data collection and management.
Dr Bediako, who is currently with
the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC), said for the country to
realise the full benefits of ICT in health delivery, there was the need to
incorporate ICT in the training of doctors, nurses and other health
professionals to enable them to apply those skills
effectively after their
education.
“Even though this will make training
programmes more elaborate and complicated, we need to train our student doctors
and nurses in ICT because we should not always be catching up in ICT. We need
to take the lead and we can do this by reviewing our health training
programmes,” she said.
Slow ICT growth
A fellow in Scientific Computing at
the Kofi Annan ICT Centre, Ernest Ofori, said the world was fast moving from an
information society to a smart society but observed that Ghana had still not
caught up with the information society after struggling for close to a decade.
“First of all, we need to catch up
with the information society we promised ourselves a decade ago so that we can
move into the smart society. We need to catch up,” he said, adding that for
that transformation to happen, the government needed to invest in building the
necessary infrastructure.
He said although some efforts were
being made in the provision of infrastructure such as the development of a
national data centre and ICT centres in schools, more needed to be done in
order to catch up with global trends.
Content
Besides, Mr Ofori said, it was
important for the state to invest in the development of content as well as put
in place the right governance systems to manage security.
He stressed the need to develop the
capacity of health workers to enable them to put data systems to good use,
while raising awareness to help the public in the use of such technologies to
improve healthcare delivery.
He said there was the need to invest
in building infrastructure to generate data, process the data, manage records,
distribute information and build analysis to improve health care.
“We cannot leave it to health
professionals alone to do it. Neither can we leave it to our technical people
alone. Even if you build infrastructure, you need someone who knows how to
build and manage software. All these structures need to be put in place if we
want to catch up,” he added.
Credit: Graphic
No comments:
Post a Comment