ICT experts challenged to protect locally made products

Accra, May 14, GNA - Ms Dorothy Gordon, Director General of the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence (KACE), has challenged local ICT experts in Ghana to adopt systems that would protect their products against what she called "technology imperialism".

By technology imperialism, she meant a situation where the Western World and other developed states tended to control the development of ICT and its products to the detriment of developing countries. Ms Gordon said this in Accra on Thursday at a day's seminar organised by the KACE to educate players in the industry, including the media, on how the adoption of ICT could improve efficiency in health delivery under the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS). She said the NHIS computerisation system would create a lot of employment avenues for people and called on the media to help to educate and create awareness on it.

Ms Gordon said Ghanaians must be ready to learn and adopt international best practices in the ICT sector because Ghana happened to be the first country to automate its health system in the West African Sub-Region.

She said she was optimistic that Ghana would be the first place other neighbouring countries would fall on to implement their health sector automation projects. Mr Ben Kusi, ICT Director for the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), said the automation would help Ghanaians to access health care even at the remotest part of the country. He said it would also help to keep accurate patients' medical history under one management where such data could be accessed for further medication at any hospital in Ghana. In addition, Mr Kusi said the old manual system where folders of patients were kept in achieves making retrieval difficult, would soon be over.

"Because of these problems patients, who want to avoid the trauma of losing their folders, take their folders home," he noted. Mr Kusi also said it would reduce the problem of queuing and over crowding at the hospitals especially in the urban centres. He said the greatest challenge would be the lack of knowledge of ICT on the part of most medical personnel but indicated that training programmes were currently being run for them to upgrade their capacity.