Telemedicine for Ghana

Telemedicine, which promotes health care delivery using information technology, is to be introduced in the country by August.

It is also to offer specialised healthcare delivery to the rural folk where 70 per cent of the population lives and various kinds of disease abound, Dr Owusu Achaw Duah, a lecturer at the University of Ghana Medical School, told the Ghana News Agency on Friday.

Explaining how the system works, he said, viewing screens would be erected at various clinics and hospitals and linked to the hub of the project, which will be in Accra.

The initiative which will be made possible with the use of telephones and computers hooked to the Internet will be a collaboration between academia, government hospitals and clinics, private health care providers, NGOs and information technology companies, Dr Duah said.

He said when there is a case which needs specialised attention the medical officer in the operating theatre calls the centre and appears on the screen with the patient and seeing the specialist the officer receives instructions on how to go about the case.

"The Telemedicine capabilities of the Internet provide opportunities for a wide range of Telemedical or combined informatics applications as networking of large health care groups, multi-campus linking of hospitals and research centres and the linkages among rural clinics and a central hospital.

"By this, health professionals in deprived communities continuously receive education and refresh their skills."

Dr Duah said health professionals recruited for the project could take part in international health conferences via satellite or the Internet.

He said specialists locally could also organise teleconferences for doctors, pharmacists, and laboratory assistants, among others, giving meaning to distance education.

"Access to education means access to better future, better health and better life," Dr Duah said.

"It is the between one person's hope and another's hopelessness which is the difference between a prosperous nation and a dependant nation. Education lays the groundwork for grassroots change and renewal, but it is of no use if those who need it cannot get it."

He said Telemedicine also allows for the use of multimedia to train health care professionals in widely distributed or remote clinical settings, capturing grand rounds on video for use in remote consultation or training.

Dr Duah said the project would also serve as a centre for learning about tropical medicine where foreign doctors and other health professionals could enrich their knowledge on diseases in African.