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ICT experts challenged to protect locally made products
Accra, May 14, Ghanadot/GNA
– Ms Dorothy Gordon, Director General of the Kofi Annan Centre
of Excellence (KACE), has challenged local ICT experts in Ghana
to adopt systems that would protect their products against what
she called “technology imperialism”.
By technology imperialism, she meant a situation where the
western world and other developed states tend to control the
development of ICT and its products to the detriment of
developing countries.
Ms Gordon said this in Accra on Thursday at a day’s seminar
organised by the KACE to educate players in the industry
including the media on how the adoption of ICT could improve
efficiency in health delivery under the NHIS.
She said the NHIS computerisation system would create a lot of
employment avenues for people and called on the media to help
educate and create awareness on it.
Ms Gordon said Ghanaians must be ready to learn and adopt
international best practices in the ICT sector because Ghana
happened to be the first country to automate its health system
in the West African Sub-Region.
She was optimistic that Ghana would be the first place other
neighbouring countries would fall on to implement their health
sector automation projects.
Mr Ben Kusi, the ICT Director for the National Health Insurance
Scheme (NHIS) said the automation would help Ghanaians to access
health care even at the remotest part of the country.
He said it would also help to keep accurate patients’ medical
history under one management where such data could be accessed
for further medication at any hospital in Ghana.
In additional, Mr Kusi said the old manual system where folders
of patients were kept in achieves making retrieval difficult,
would soon be over.
“Because of these problems patients, who want to avoid the
trauma of loosing their folders, take their folders home,” he
noted.
Mr Kusi also said it would reduce the problem of queuing and
over crowding at the hospitals especially in the urban centres.
He said the greatest challenge would be the lack of knowledge of
ICT on the part of most medical personnel but indicated that
currently training programmes were being run for them to upgrade
their capacity.
GNA
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