HEALTH
workers in the Northern Region have made an appeal to the government to invest
in deploying Information Communication and Technology (ICT) tools in the health
sector to enhance healthcare delivery.
In their estimation, using ICT to
process patient’s records and other critical data would not only speed up
service delivery, but also improve health sector administration.
They noted that some of the current
challenges facing various health facilities, such as over-crowding at the OPDs
and difficulty in processing health insurance claims, could be surmounted when
these units are migrated from manual onto an ICT platform.
The health workers made the appeal at a
training workshop on how to mainstream ICT in healthcare delivery in the
country.
The Ghana Information Network for
Knowledge Sharing (GINKS) organised the workshop in collaboration with Savana
Signatures, an ICT-focused non-governmental organisation.
The participants included health personnel
from some of the hospitals, National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) offices and
Births and Deaths Registry.
The main objective of the training was
to expose the health workers to various ways of using ICTS in managing
patients’ data for an effective health delivery system.
The participants however noted that policy
makers needed to be convinced to appreciate the importance of ICT to the health
sector.
“We need to impress on policy makers to
pursue this agenda. Apart from initiating the policies, it is they who provide
the funds for implementation,” one of the participants, Mr Osman Wahab, stated.
The participants however stressed the
need for the deployment of ICT in the health sector to be done gradually
because rushing it would pose problems due to the lack of finance, logistics
and human resource.
In an interview, the Regional ICT
Co-ordinator of the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) for the Upper
East Region, Mr Hassan Hamadu explained that the use of ICT reduces the time
and labour spent in processing patients’ data and also facilitates planning.
“If you have an electronic database of
these records, by a click of a button you can generate reports easily and
periodically,” he stated.
The Director of Filla Consult, Mr
William Nsiah-Asare also stated in an interview that the manual processing of
health insurance claims poses major difficulties for various health facilities
due to the large number of clients.
“The NHIA sometimes rejects some claims
made by the facilities partly due to mistakes in the claims processing, thereby
denying the facilities of the revenues due them,” he mentioned.
Mr Nsiah-Asare noted that his company
had developed a software programme that was being used by health facilities to
process claim forms more effectively and accurately.
“The software enables the claim
management officers to collate claim forms and produce summary reports easily
so they could access their payments,” he explained.
He mentioned the Yendi Government Hospital,
Tamale West Hospital and Gusheigu Government hospital as some of the health
facilities that had began using the software.
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