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Mr Alex Segbefia, Minister of Health, has launched a new E-Health initiative in the Central Region to help address challenges of record keeping in health facilities.

The project, which is at its pilot stage, has started at the Kasoa Polyclinic and is being rolled out by Lightwave, a technology service provider.

It aims at creating a centralised data centre with a 24-hour unit that will serve as an infrastructure platform for patients wherever they find themselves.

The new system will help better manage care of patients and keep their track records for easy accessibility any time they visit health facilities.

The minister said at the launch of the project that a number of challenges had existed in the health sector for a long time due to the manual process used.

He said the project had therefore come at the right time to ensure the tracking of patients and integrate it into the current National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) system.

The system will provide accurate, up-to-date and complete information about patients at the point of care.

“This will reduce costs through decreased paperwork because of its computerised processes and ensure proper checks and balances. “

Mr Segbefia therefore appealed to the doctors and nurses of the clinic to ensure that the new system worked to enable it to operate in all other parts of the country.

He again urged that doctor-patient confidentiality be ensured at all cost due to the legal implications involved for the success of the project.

Dr Lucio Dery, Deputy Regional Director, Health Services, expressed gratitude to government for the initiative.

He said the quality of care and service delivery to patients had been their major challenge in the sector and the E-Health system would help reduce patient movement and subscriber time and improve their revenue base.

Dr Dery thus appealed to the staff to attach all seriousness to the project to optimise their objectives.

Mr Thomas Mac Scofield, Chief Technology Officer, Lightwave, said the system had been designed in a single source that would allow for easy access by clinical operators by integrating patient information from multiple sources.

He said the system also conformed to the laws of the country per the dictates of the Ghana Data Law to ensure its safety and thereby improve health information reporting capacities of nurses and doctors.

The system will also enhance networking of all hospitals, clinics and Community Health Clinics in every region, district and sub-district and connect all health centres to a centralised data server.

The project, which will be carried out at 25 health facilities in the Central Region, has currently started with five districts and is expected to end by March 2017.