A Multi-national technology and consulting corporation, International Business Machines (IBM), has recommended the establishment of a national centralised e-health system by the Ghana Health Service (GHS), to monitor policies to help eliminate mother-to-child transmission of HIV and AIDs in the country.
Visa EssAccording to IBM, the centralised systems would help monitor all healthcare facilities in the country and develop patient-centred programmes, which could help reduce the disease to the barest minimum.
They also recommended that the system be rolled out in all GHS facilities nationwide, including CHIP compounds by 2020.
The recommendation was made last week Friday, at the end of a month-long consulting assignment of the IBM Corporate Service Corps held in partnership with the GHS and Yale University in Accra.
Achieving zero transmission
Speaking to the Daily Graphic, an Associate Professor, Pediatric Infectious Diseases and Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine, Mr Elijah Paintsil, said Ghana had made a lot of progress in reducing the HIV prevalence, hence the programme to detect more effective technology and information systems to reach the target of less infections by 2020.
He indicated that the country had been working on how to implement the centralised systems in the past two years and with information from the team, the country had indepth information on the gaps in the system to push the programme.
Implementation of recommendation
He indicated that a coordinating team of public private partnership would be used to ensure that the recommendations were implemented.
“I wish I can forecast how successful we will be, but it is always not easy to forecast, I can only say we are highly optimistic from the responses we have got from the stakeholders and, particularly, from the government of Ghana.”
He added that the programme was dear to the heart of the President and as such would not be difficult implementing it soon.
