The Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, yesterday launched the national electronic health record (E-Health) project, to deliver integrated healthcare across the country for improved health outcomes.

Otherwise known as the Lightwave Health Infor­mation Management System (LHIMS), the project seeks to enrol all public health facilities onto a com­mon platform, mainstreaming the medical records of patients electronically, for an enhanced service delivery. • Dr Bawumia (third from right) with other dignitaries after the programme In effect, patients being referred from one hospital to the other, regardless of location or region, would no longer have to carry their files or repeat their medical history for attention as all records would be accessible on LHIMS.

Piloted in 2018, the LHIMS was approved in 2019 for implementation and had since been deployed in all six teaching hospitals, 10 regional hospitals, 243 district hospitals, three psychiatric hospitals, and 50 polyclinics as well as 1,000 health centres across the 16 regions of Ghana.

With an estimated 21 million Ghanaians now captured on the system, work is ongoing to enrol other health centres and CHPS compounds across the country. "The days where patient records and case history existed in silos are no longer with us.