Issues on E-health Adoption in Nigeria

Abstract

E-health is the application of information technology for health care management. It includes all applications of information communication technologies to promote healthcare services support, delivery and education for improving efficiency in health care delivery to the citizens. Many factors contribute to the poor state of the medical sector of Nigeria, and in fact many developing countries, two of the most important being record keeping and accessibility. Nigeria still operates a paper based healthcare delivery system; meeting demands of citizens have been increasingly difficult due to her huge population, understaffed hospitals, apathy towards embracing ICTs and other issues. On the other hand, ICT applications have been used successfully in developed countries to address most of these problems. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the healthcare system in Nigeria while highlighting confronting issues with a view to proposing a viable solution.