‘Nigeria needs policy on ehealth’

Can you tell us what telemedicine and ehealth are all about? Telemedicine is the provision of health services over a distance to a population that does not have access. This distance could be geographical; it could also be within the same hospital whereby you need to have access to a senior healthcare provider for second […]

Can you tell us what telemedicine and ehealth are all about?
Telemedicine is the provision of health services over a distance to a population that does not have access. This distance could be geographical; it could also be within the same hospital whereby you need to have access to a senior healthcare provider for second opinion.
  Also, it could be for education, that is, it can be used to train health science students both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels when distance separates them from where they work and where they are obtaining training. It is making a phone call at a distance on health delivery.
The ehealth is like an umbrella of all that happens in the space of health and Information Communication Technology (ICT). World Health Organisation (WHO) defines it as the use of ICT to support healthcare. So, whatever tool or services of ICT that is used in health care, is ehealth – which is electronic health.

 What is your assessment of the use of telemedicine in Nigeria and how would it benefit the country’s health system especially in the rural areas?
There are not many assessments in terms of measuring exactly where we are but there have been one or two studies that have tried to look at ICT in health in Nigeria. Some of their findings indicate that Nigeria is gradually moving towards a matured ICT environment.
 I will say ehealth is still at its experimental phase where we are trying to see how we can tap into its potentials. That is my personal assessment of ehealth developmental phase.
 There is a need for the national technical committee on ehealth to get stakeholders to align to what is happening at the Federal Ministry of Health, so that we can buy fully into it.
 In essence, there is a lot more to be done for people at the very remotest parts of Nigeria to have access to it.
We need a policy that will state the exact direction for stakeholders, that is, the Nigerian policy for ehealth.
Outside the policy, we need to standardise and have governance in terms of ethics and in terms of the standards. 

Many hospitals in Nigeria are yet to embrace ehealth, what is the way forward?
The only way forward is advocacy and communications. What you don’t know is useless to you. There is a lot we are telling the society, we are extending to partners because when people are educated about the potentials and benefit of it then, they begin to ask for it because education stimulates demand.
 They will begin to ask their leaders, their representatives because of its benefits. So as it is, the knowledge and information of what ehealth can do is not out there to the consumers of health services.
As a matter of fact, there are lots of projects that have been on in Nigeria for about 10 years. It is good to know if it is really working. There must be a way to measure the impact and do what we call Randomised Control Trial Studies (RCTS), the way to prove to government to spend more on this.

What should the government do to facilitate telemedicine and ehealth in Nigeria?
 I want to commend government to a certain extent. We are not there yet but we have been able over the years to pull it through getting stakeholders together in several fora and until recently at the 55th National Health Council in Sokoto they approved a national ehealth strategy and it is in the website of the Ministry of Health accessible for all stakeholders.
 That is the direction the government is going and showing what it will be investing on, and also to be able to coordinate ehealth activities at the national level and provide health sector leadership to drive ehealth.
 It will be of paramount interest to government to also start thinking of building capacity. As we are thinking of the kind of infrastructures we want to implement as a nation, we are going to be doing national health information exchange infrastructure. The committee is on, I am a privileged member. There is a lot of work to see how this will be deployed. It is doable but also we need to have the capacity.
 So, there is a need to build the capacity of the health work force, the ICT work force in ehealth and that is another critical role I see the society for ehealth and telemedicine also playing from now into the nearest future. How do we get those who are working already trained? Because it is not enough to have the fund and the resources but we must bear in mind that the nation’s resources is dwindling and there is less to spend and there will be less to spend on health, talk less of the technology aspect of health.
 But the approach will be trying to get private sectors for investment in this area. It creates opportunities for employment for Nigerians and can also contribute to the digital economy of Nigeria because health is the only industry that lives and dwells strictly on information.
You can see that with electronic health the information can now move freely from dispatched region to another without the consumers or the providers of those services moving.

In what basic ways can health delivery be improved in Nigeria?
 The only way to improve e-health in Nigeria is to promote health which can be done spending more on public health education by both the government and private sectors.
 We must be ready to spend more on educating the government, educating the citizens, educating the private sectors whereby every consumer of health services is an informed and active participant in decisions that matter to their health. In that way we can take more responsibility and we can improve the quality because ehealth plays a primary role so that information can reach the unreachable through their mobile phones and SMS in their local languages with respect to our different cultural diversities.
 For instance, if an old man in the village can get information on washing hands after going to the toilet it will save government much more investment than spending on the outbreak of cholera, therefore there is the need to invest more on it.

 Tell us about the society for telemedicine and ehealth in Nigeria. How have you been able to impact the lives of the populace with it?
I founded the association with some interested group of individuals – the society for telemedicine and ehealth and the national society of professionals from diverse backgrounds and individuals who felt there is a need to keep abreast the happenings in this aspect of health.
 We started in April 2005. One key thing we started with was the knowledge that was not there. People don’t understand what this is all about or how it works but the focus was not on projects but providing advocacy and communication.
 We do workshops, seminars and national conferences every year since 2005 and we organised the first national stakeholders meeting on telemedicine and ehealth on October 27, 2005 during president Obasanjo’s regime. Also in 2006, we hosted Africa in our first ever national conference on ehealth. What we were doing then was building momentum and increasing awareness so people can see that the work of the past years is yielding result.
Shortly, we will start having curriculums at our next conference coming up on November 24- 25 tagged ‘Building Capacity for ehealth, 2016 system’ with stakeholders.
 We will also be inaugurating strategic advisory board and the council for ehealth which will comprise of all health related and ICT professional bodies and their regulatory bodies.