Lack of Integration in Software Systems for Health Practitioners in Nigeria: The Way Forward
Batya Oluwagbemi Oluwatolania, Philip Achimugu · Journal of health informatics in developing countries · 2010
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.