NITDA to Partner Garki Hospital On e-Health

The National information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has expressed its willingness to partner with Garki Hospital to improve health care delivery in the country

The partnership which aims at increasing the level of government commitment to the Public Private Partnership in terms of eHealth deployment in what will be a Pilot Project which both parties expect will scale up over time.

Dr. Vincent Olatunji, acting director general of NITDA, while hosting Dr. Ibrahim Wada, the chief medical director of the Hospital, in NITDA headquarter today informed that ‘we need to develop our health sector to e globally competitive” adding that with adequate deployment of ICT tools in our health system, the  sector could make Nigeria medical tourism destination.

Dr. Olatunji emphasized that partnering with organisation like Garki Hospital would be a win-win situation for the hospital and the country at large as the effects of such collaboration would benefit the populace.

Highlighting the importance of the partnership, Dr. Wada stated that the marriage between the hospital and NITDA should be as seen marriage of purpose with the aims of improving on the IT equipment and capacity of the hospital.

“The hospital can boast of 95% IT compliance as we have digitalized all most all our operations. We have migrated from paper based medical record keeping to digital but we still need to map out how we can partner with NITDA to produce good health care delivery using IT.

He sought the NITDA interventions on the establishment of e-library, Training of health personnel in ICT, Patients engagement and education and telemedicine service development.

Mrs. Hadiza Umar, head, Public Affairs at NITDA, said in a press statement that the Agency assured the hospital that their requests would be look into as they are in line with the Agency’s project on health sectors.

Dr. Nkem Momah, head of E- Health Unit of the Agency, stated that the stated that this initiative was coming at a good time when NITDA is in the process of developing standards and guidelines for eHealth deployment nationally.

He assured that the two organisations have enough capacity to drive the initiative and would form a committee to come up with modalities for the partnership.