Digital Health

Biography

Biography: Moses Braimah

Abstract

The Lagos State is touted to be the 5^th largest in Africa when compared and put at the same pedestal with other countries in the continent. The population of Lagos State is over 20 million. The state health’s mandate is to protect, promote and restore the health of Lagosians and to facilitate the unfettered access to quality healthcare services without financial or other barriers. The state boasts of a health system that encompasses both public and private service providers, with 70% being provided by the private sector. In January 2020, they organized a conference where their plan to provide a technology platform known as the Lagos State Health Information Platform (LASHIP) was announced. LASHIP is expected to connect and enable all healthcare providers in both the public and private sectors exchange data and information in a defined format. The benefits to the management and delivery of healthcare services through this effort once it comes on stream cannot be over emphasized. Policy direction like this comes with its own challenges due to increase in digitalization.During the height of COVID-19 challenges, Lagos as the epicenter of the pandemic generated a lot of healthcare data. These on its own have created a lot of challenge in data and information management, also in terms of quality, security and protection of sensitive personal information because there is no existing structure or policy in place to manage the data centrally. Moreover, as healthcare data are increasingly digitized, privacy issues and various forms of data protection regulation compliance / governance of sensitive healthcare data/ information become inevitable.The Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR) and other renowned bodies such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), have imposed various forms of regulations that should be complied with on sensitivity of personal information. This is to ensure proper protection of the various data subjects. Breach of any part of the NDPR in Nigeria will result to various kinds of heavy penalties and reputational damage to the state government. As a forward looking governmental organization, the LSMOH decided to embark on full compliance by initiating a data governance programme.Consequently, LSMOH contracted Computics Limited to help drive the process. The journey has not being an easy one. As a public sector organization were most of the activities are being done manually, semi-manually and digitalization in few and isolated cased the task is herculean. The presentation is share experience through a case study that will enrich discuss at the Data Quality and Information Conference through a case study. The experience and interesting outcomes are worth sharing. The journey was not only revealing but shows how the public sector needs to be re-jigged in order to make any meaningful progress in the implementation of the project report.