Develop framework for use of ICT-Health experts urged

Story: Michael Donkor

Vice-President John Dramani Mahama has called on health experts in Africa to develop a framework that will enhance the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to make health service accessible to the people, particularly those in the rural areas.
With the advent of mobile telephony, he said simple health messages could be devised and communicated to the people on daily basis.
He said Africa needed such a framework to review its policies and strategies for achieving its major health goals beyond the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Mr Mahama made the call at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Annual Ministerial Review Conference in Accra yesterday.
The two-day conference is being attended by members of the Economic Commission for Africa, African Ministers of Health, and representatives of United Nations (UN) bodies.
Mr Mahama, therefore, called on all the members of ECOSOC to consider the meeting as one that would define how they in Africa would deploy electronic health solution for the sake of their people.
He said there was the need for an African position on the way and manner ICT must be deployed on the continent.
The Vice-President charged them to avoid a situation where solutions were not based on African problems and challenges but rather on other systems which did not have identical challenges.
Mr Mahama said he had seen proposals that aimed at high-end telemedicine technology but which did not take into account the existing human and technical resource at both ends of the set-up, the cost involved, and whether they addressed their priorities.
He said most African countries had regrettably made slow processes in the application of electronic health solutions probably because investments in this area had been misdirected by hard talking technology-oriented vendors who did not understand their circumstances and yet claimed to hold the solutions to their problems.
The Minister of Environment, Science and Technology, Madam-Sherry Ayittey, stressed the need for ICT to be used to improve the healthcare needs of women and children.
She said such technology should also be cost-effective and affordable and urged the government to collaborate with ICT experts to explore the power of the technology for the benefit of all.
The Minister of Health, Dr George Yankey, appealed to health experts to make ehealth a necessary facilitator in healthcare delivery.
The President of ECOSOC, Madam Sylvie Lucas, said the objective of ehealth was to improve primary healthcare delivery.
She urged African governments to seek the opportunity of ICT to advance health care in their countries.
The Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Mr Thomas Stelzer, observed that ehealth could be used to address challenges such as lack of infrastructure, heavy disease burden and brain drain, in a comprehensive manner.
It could help scale health care appropriately to each economy and also enable a transformation from disease management to a focus on proactive wellness, he added.