Agency to partner with Garki Hospital on e-Health

According to media reports, the National information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) has stated that it is willing to partner with Garki Hospital to improve health care delivery in the country.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek reports that the partnership aims to increase the level of government commitment to the Public Private Partnership in terms of eHealth deployment.

Dr. Vincent Olatunji, acting DG of NITDA, while hosting Dr. Ibrahim Wada, the chief medical director of the Hospital, at the NITDA headquarters today, reiterated the "need to develop our health sector to be 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 an organization like the 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 citizenry.

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Emphasizing the importance of the partnership, Dr. Wada stated that the marriage between the hospital and NITDA should be viewed as 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," said Wada.

He sought the intervention of NITDA on the establishment of an e-library, training of health personnel on ICT, patient engagement and education, and telemedicine service development.

In a press statement, Mrs. Hadiza Umar, Head, Public Affairs at NITDA, said the Agency assured the hospital that their requests would be considered as they match with the Agency’s intended projects in the health sector.