The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, yesterday launched the national electronic health record (E-Health) project, to deliver integrated healthcare across the country for improved health outcomes.
Otherwise known as the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS), the project seeks to enrol all public health facilities onto a common platform, mainstreaming the medical records of patients electronically, for an enhanced service delivery.
In effect, patients being referred from one hospital to the other, regardless of location or region, would no longer have to carry their files or repeat their medical history for attention as all records would be accessible on LHIMS.
Piloted in 2018, the LHIMS was approved in 2019 for implementation and had since been deployed in all six teaching hospitals, 10 regional hospitals, 243 district hospitals, three psychiatric hospitals, and 50 polyclinics as well as 1,000 health centres across the 16 regions of Ghana.
With an estimated 21 million Ghanaians now captured on the system, work is ongoing to enrol other health centres and CHPS compounds across the country.
“The days where patient records and case history existed in silos are no longer with us. The LHIMS application as part of the national e-health project over the last six years had been instrumental in delivering efficient and effective healthcare in the country and the impact has been tremendous so far,” the Vice President said.
Dr Bawumia said LHIMS had helped for easy patient record portability, eliminated manual record keeping, improved revenue accuracy and accurate submission of NHIS claims, reduced waiting time, improved access to actionable epidemic information promptly and enabled early detection of disease outbreaks among others.
The flag bearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) indicated that with the positive results achieved so far with LHIMS, Ghana was well placed to roll out an efficient telemedicine programme to further decentralise healthcare delivery and save more lives.
The Minister of Health, Dr Bernard Okoe-Boye, commended the Vice President for his foresight towards digitising sectors of the economy for enhanced service delivery.
He said, the deployment of LHIMS had seen many benefits across the clinical, operational, technical, and economic areas of the health sector.
Dr Okoe-Boye commended all whose efforts had seen the success of the project this far, assuring that the Ministry would continue working around the clock to reduce human interfaces and corruption in health.
Mr Eric Agyei, the Project Manager of LHIMS, said the achievements made so far with the platform demonstrated the transformative impact of e-health in Ghana, to position the country as a leader in healthcare innovation.
BY ABIGAIL ANNOH