By VICTORIA OJEME
The Federal Ministry of Health is partnering with the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology towards making the health sector to be Information Communication Technology (ICT) driven to boost health care and make it more accessible to Nigerians.

Declaring open a National Conference on ICT in Health in Abuja last week, Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu noted that the present traditional health care delivery system in Nigeria has the challenge of increasing costs.

“Our traditional ways of doing things can no longer be accepted. There is need to find innovative ways to bring down costs in the health care delivery. Whereas the traditional systems of health care delivery has been known over the years to be tainted with increasing costs with Primary Health Care.

“ICT has potential if properly deployed to lower costs of health care, while opening up new modalities for patient treatment and welfare. We will need to deploy ICT to increase accessibility to health care especially for those that are vulnerable or in the remote areas that are mostly in need of health care.

“Equally paramount is to ensure that we deploy ICT to improve the quality of health care delivery. The time is very much ripe to have Electronic Medical Record system in all Federal Health institutions,” he added

Areas where ICT could be of help in the health sector to include leadership and governance, health service delivery, human resources for health, financing for health, national health management information system, community participation and ownership, partnerships for health and research for health.

In the view of Country Director, WHO, David Okello, “The role of ICT is integral to achieve the national need as functional health information systems depend on harmonised and interoperable data elements and appropriate use of ICTs.”