ATBUTH AND EASY ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE
The health sector entirely has been dwindling amid challenges that make it hard for citizens to get access to healthcare. Many have gone through immeasurable hardships whenever they or their relatives are sick. Some even lost their lives not only because of arriving the hospital late but because of difficulties in accessing their files.
Saving lives in emergency is one of the ethics all health workers. However, people from far places especially those from remote villages or local clinics undergo tedious processes before they are finally attended to by doctors. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University Teaching Hospital (ATBUTH) after critical observation of the prolonged years of hardship in line with its vision and mission, came up with developmental idea, primarily for the benefit of healthcare providers and patients as well as relatives or people that take their wards to the hospital.
For decades, people have been complaining about over congestion at card registration unit, hardship at banks when paying medical bills, delayed laboratory results, missing hard copies of patient’s medical records, uncertainties of getting doctors on ground during consultations, less data for those conducting researches and absence of centralized information of all medical and non-medical staff of the Teaching Hospital. These among others predicaments prompted the management to start the e-health system. Though the hospital started deploying EMR infrastructure since 2015, some challenges hindered the progress of the process. Now, the management of the hospital with the support and encouragement from the Federal Ministry of Health and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has optimized the system to ensure that the set goals are achieved.
Interestingly, the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is aimed at changing the narrative and problems being encountered by the staff, patients and their relatives from the time they are admitted up till when they are discharged. People from villages that lost their cards have nothing to worry about as their details are stored in the hospital’s data bank.
Similarly, with the development of EMR, students and lecturers that carry out final year projects as well as those doing researches, will get data necessary for smooth researches.
The system will pave way for everyone irrespective of gender, age or geographical location to access efficient healthcare within short span of time.
Usman Abdullahi Kol,
