Poor adoption of ICT in health sector:NIGERIA’s healthcare system is in a comatose state at this point in time. Medical professionals take to strike at the slightest provocation, patients are poorly treated especially at the government owned hospitals, records are poorly kept, besides the use of certain medical equipments probably donated by a foreign organisation or bought by the authorities, the Nigerian health care sector is still way behind in its adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT).
Health Tourism:
A couple of weeks back, I listened to a radio programme which featured a Nigerian doctor and his counterpart from Turkey talk extensively about how Nigerians were spending huge sums of money seeking medical help in Turkey. But that was not the interest for me because it’s no news how much Nigerians are contributing to the economy of India, Turkey and several others via what they now call “health tourism”. Indian companies now have the effrontery to place adverts directly from India on Nigerian dailies something I never witnessed while growing up.
Role of ICT:
Back to the radio show I mentioned earlier, what interested me most is on what the Turkish doctor kept harping on the role ICT is playing in delivering quality health services to Turkish people and by extension the many Nigerians who throng to their country seeking medical help just like India, for ailments our doctors could have handled with ease if equipped with the right tools and requisite technology.
The Turkish doctor noted that though Nigerian doctors were excellent, but that they were way behind in the appreciation of how far ICT has taken medical practice and efficient healthcare delivery. He then went ahead to discuss the various ways ICT has helped facilitate efficient healthcare delivery in Turkey. In fact, he announced with glee that most of their Nigerian patients are remotely treated using high-speed technology. In other words, they don’t have to come to Turkey to get expert attention and they had already recorded some successes using this medium with the aid of technology. Here are some of the ways ICT has helped facilitate efficient healthcare delivery:
Patient Records:
Have you ever had any reason to visit any government hospital? I have and the experience was not pleasant at all because record keeping is still paper-based hence keeping and tracking patients’ records is so cumbersome and frustrating.
Today, ICT has changed all that. Patients’ records are now stored in computer-aided databases, and at the click of a button, patients’ medical history such as prescribed drugs and what illness the patient has suffered from could be tracked.
In fact, data base of patients could now be used to track trends in illnesses such as heart disease as well as track organ donors and patients needing transplant. And so, access to patients’ records are now quicker, takes up less space, makes reading easier as well as makes transfer of cases between doctors and hospitals quicker and less cumbersome.
Research:
Because of the complexities of the human body and the continual emergence of new diseases, research in medical sciences is an on-going activity. But the good news is that ICT has changed the way medical scientists conduct research.
With ICT, new drugs could now be easily modeled to test its effects on the ultimate consumers, facilitate clinical trials online as well as facilitate collaboration, information and knowledge sharing between international teams of medical researchers’ real time.
One amazing contribution of ICT to efficient healthcare delivery in the 21st Century is that one could find a wide variety of medical information online such as:
•Symptom diagnosis, for people who wish to identify their problem without consulting a General practitioner (GP)
•Access to medical research/journals
•Information about side effects
•Information about available treatments
By so doing, one could access information 24/7, get support from sufferers of similar ailment and access relevant research results from other professionals, which could help cure an ailment in one’s part of the world.
Medical Equipment:
For countless number of times, you may have heard Nigerian doctors complain of lack or inadequate equipment to work with, and oftentimes whatever equipment they have are either outdated or antiquated. Today, equipment such as body scanners are now ICT-aided and could be used to process data into readable formats, microprocessors could also now be used to control a variety of medical devices such as pacemakers and Computer-guided lasers is used in very delicate operations such as removal of brain tumours.
The advantages are numerous – such computer-aided equipment saves a lot of time and reduces waiting time. Interestingly, surgeons could now perform operations remotely through tele-conferencing and prescribe drugs through tele-medicine.
Expert Systems:
Expert systems also called knowledge-based systems are computer programmes that attempt to replicate the performance of a human expert on some specialized reasoning tasks, store and manipulate knowledge so that they could help the user solve a problem or make a decision such as diagnose a disease. For example, the robot is an expert system, which has been used to perform very delicate surgeries such as surgeries in the brain.
These expert systems have huge advantages – they could store more knowledge than human beings, a large database of knowledge could be stored and kept up-to-date. Unlike the human person, these expert systems will not forget or get facts wrong and they could acquire knowledge faster than a human doctor.
Of course, these systems have their disadvantages particularly as we are still grappling with the problems of constant power supply, low bandwidth, snail-speed internet connectivity, ill-trained health personnel and poor or inadequate funding. But the truth of the matter is that we cannot stay behind for too long because the world is not going to wait for us to catch up.
Recently, I read a story In a Rwandan newspaper – The Rwanda Focus about how much the Rwandese government was investing in getting its health sector computerised and one of the Rwandese doctors interviewed said “great strides are being made to improve health care services through the use of ICT.
One of the most promising ICT development projects … is the e-health project, which involves three main projects: the store and forward system, the tele-medicine video conferencing and the real time tele-medicine system.”
In addition the doctor said they have set up the system in two hospitals; Ruhengeri and Kabgayi district hospitals. “The two hospitals are connected to the main national referral hospital, which is King Faisal,” he explained, adding that the system works like this; a patient is diagnosed at for example at Kabgayi, where the doctor will do the necessary tests, the results of which are sent via the system to the referral doctor in King Faisal. The latter then examines the tests and proposes the treatment.
“We often transfer patients to referral hospitals such as King Faisal and CHUK, but regularly documents get lost or patients fail to explain to referral doctors what they have been diagnosed with and which preliminary drugs they have been given. With the store and forward system, we send all relevant documents and test results directly to the referral hospitals, so doctors can examine them and treat the patients accordingly.”
Guess what? The above story was published in The Rwanda Focus in August of 2009 and this is 2014.
It is high time we in Nigeria start to give ICT more attention as it affects every area of human existence.
... Making SENSE of digital revolution!
No comments:
Post a Comment