Tunji Alausa Inaugurated As Chairman Of Nigeria’s Digital In Health Initiative

Eko Hot Blog reports that the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof. Mohammed Ali Pate, has inaugurated the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Tunji Alausa, as the Chairman of the Implementation Committee for Nigeria’s Digital in Health Initiative.

Pate inaugurated the committee on Friday, March 15, 2024, at the Musa Yar’adua Centre, FCT Abuja.

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The committee is expected to manage the deployment, architectural design and pilot of a Electronic Medical Record (EMR) platform that keeps track of patient data, promotes research, provides treatment, and manages operations and resources.

It will also provide guidance for the coordination, implementation and execution of the overarching activities at all levels to drive the federal government’s health digitalisation agenda.

Furthermore, the committee was set up to midwife data policy, regulation, repository management and serve as an ombudsman to establish a national digital health environment that will support the scale-up of our digital health interventions such as our national unified EMR platform in the first instance.

In his inaugural speech as chairman of the implementation committee, Dr. Alausa said a national unified EMR platform will serve as a central hub to enhance health system efficiency, ensure robust monitoring of public health and disease outbreaks, mortality rates, facilitate seamless data exchange and quality assurance, and foster opportunities for further research to strengthen our national health security.

“It will also hold our various institutions accountable, and ultimately, allow us to have ownership of our data from the primary to the federal healthcare level for the first time in Nigeria’s history,” the minister said.

“A national EMR system would enable primary, secondary, and tertiary healthcare personnel to manage clinical and administrative data seamlessly across centres and achieve three immediate benefits:

“i) Improved quality of care by providing health care providers with instant access to comprehensive patient records, leading to more accurate diagnosis and personalized treatment plans.

“ii) Reduced expenditure on health through reduction of tests due to avoided duplication and

“iii) Increased staff capacity and productivity, through the reduction of time spent on paper based administrative tasks. All these would lead to better health outcomes for our citizens.”

The chairman of the implementation committee also stated that the Nigeria’s Digital in Health Initiative will initially begin at the federal tertiary hospitals and be implemented in one state per geo-political zone, to gauge its efficiency and accuracy.

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“Once reviewed, we will encourage both public and private sub-national institutions to key in, allowing for a national robust and unified EMR platform,” Dr. Alausa added.

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