Health Care

www.jhidc.org Vol.4 • No.1 • 2010

Lack of Integration in Software Systems for Health Practitioners in Nigeria: The Way Forward

Batya Oluwagbemi Oluwatolaniaa and Achimugu Philipb

Abstract

a

Department of Computer & Information Science, Lead City University Ibadan. Department of Computer & Information Science, Lead City University Ibadan.

b

The healthcare industry is composed of primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare providers in Nigeria. Each provider needs to exchange information with other providers. Information Systems (IS) developed on different types of hardware and software platforms serve this need. Due to the heterogeneous and distributed nature of information and communicating technology (ICT) in the healthcare industry, sharing of the data has become an issue. There is an urgent need for the integration of these distributed IS. Several efforts have been made to achieve the integration, but traditional methods can only in part address integration problems. This paper presents a new approach to solving the critical healthcare systems integration problem. The premise is that any significant level of healthcare systems integration requires the development and use of a common data model. Keywords: Information Systems, Enterprise Application Integration, Hardware, Software, ICT

Introduction

Health information systems (HIS) comprise the entire infrastructure, organization, workforce and components for the collection, processing, storage, transmission, display, dissemination and disposition of information in the healthcare industry. In many clinical and hospitals settings, HIS tend to consist of enormous silos of paper-based or electronic data that are fragmented or of poor quality, exposing systems to risk of infraction. Within organizations, information technology implementation decisions are often made at the departmental level, with each department choosing technologies and solutions based on its own needs and beliefs (Erasala et al.,...