Dr. Ekua Amoakoh, Deputy Spokesperson for former Vice-President and New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearer, Mahamudu Bawumia, has attributed the persistent “no bed syndrome” in Ghana’s health facilities to the dismantling of the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS) by the Mahama-led NDC administration and Health Minister Kwabena Mintah Akandoh.
Speaking on the issue, Dr. Amoakoh argued that recent developments in the health sector, particularly the introduction of a new digital platform, point to the destruction of a system she said was already working and delivering results.
Dr. Amoakoh stressed that Ghana is now committing substantial public resources to the development and deployment of a new software system for laboratory services, despite the fact that these same capabilities were already fully embedded within the LHIMS platform.
The deputy Spokesperson Bawumia underscored that this duplication of effort not only represents a wasteful use of scarce national resources but also exposes a lack of continuity in policy direction.
According to her, LHIMS was designed as an integrated, end-to-end digital health solution, enabling real-time coordination across facilities, including the tracking of bed availability nationwide.
She argued that the abandonment of such a system has directly undermined efficient patient management, contributing significantly to the resurgence of the “no bed syndrome,” where patients are referred between facilities without prior confirmation of space availability.
She referenced remarks by the Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, who at a media engagement at the Jubilee House announced the rollout of the Ghana Health Information Management System (GHIMS) to replace the suspended LHIMS.
According to her, the Minister’s explanation that the transition to GHIMS would end manual medical record-keeping in Ghana’s health facilities was, in effect, an admission that LHIMS had been abandoned.
She maintained that the move had contributed directly to inefficiencies within the healthcare system, including the worsening of the no bed syndrome.
Dr. Amoakoh further contended that the government’s justification for discontinuing LHIMS, including claims of procurement irregularities and technical shortcomings, was misleading.
She rejected assertions by the Minister that the $100 million LHIMS contract, awarded in 2019 to connect 950 health facilities, had significantly underperformed.
Meanwhile, a leaked confidential document submitted to the Ghana Health Service has brought renewed scrutiny to the country’s ongoing digital health transition, exposing an ambitious and highly compressed plan to deploy an Integrated National Laboratory Information System (INLIS) within just seven months.
The document, prepared by MedTrack Technologies Limited, and marked “Confidential & Proprietary”, outlines what it describes as an “Accelerated Deployment” model for the development of the Integrated National Laboratory Information System (INLIS).
According to the document, the project timeline has been drastically reduced from an initial 39-month schedule to a seven-month implementation window, raising critical concerns about feasibility, governance, and the broader direction of Ghana’s health digitisation agenda.
The contents of the leaked plan suggest an aggressive restructuring of conventional project delivery processes, with technical development scheduled to begin as early as the third week, well before requirements gathering is completed.
This “hyper-parallel execution model,” as described in the document, effectively eliminates the traditional step-by-step approach in favour of overlapping phases, where planning, development, and testing occur simultaneously.
The document further reveals that the pilot rollout of the system is expected to commence by the fifth month, leaving very little room for system stabilisation or user adaptation before national scale-up.
It explicitly warns that the success of the entire project is dependent on what it calls an “accelerated governance model,” requiring the Ghana Health Service to respond to approvals, feedback and stakeholder coordination within 24 to 48 hours.
Perhaps most striking is the document’s own admission of risk.
It concedes that compressing a nearly three-and-a-half-year project into seven months introduces significant implementation challenges and states that success would be difficult to achieve without extraordinary intervention from top-level authorities.
It cautions that even minor delays could have disproportionate consequences, noting that a one-week setback could account for five percent of the total project timeline.
The plan places heavy demands on the Ghana Health Service, calling for the immediate availability of regional directors, laboratory heads, and technical personnel, as well as the embedding of decision-makers within project teams to fast-track approvals.
It also proposes a drastic reduction in standard review timelines, replacing multi-week approval cycles with a 24-hour sign-off protocol to keep development on track.
Beyond concerns about speed and feasibility, the emergence of the document raises deeper questions about policy continuity and resource utilisation within Ghana’s health sector.
The INLIS system, as described, includes functionalities such as laboratory data management, integration with DHIS2 platforms, and real-time reporting capabilities—features that analysts say are not entirely new to the country’s digital health ecosystem.
This has fueled debate over whether the country is investing in parallel systems rather than consolidating existing infrastructure, particularly at a time when healthcare facilities continue to grapple with operational challenges.
The document also indicates the risks associated with such a compressed rollout, including potential delays in stakeholder engagement, bottlenecks in approvals, and integration hurdles with existing systems. It warns that any expansion in project scope, even minor additions, could derail the timeline, prompting a strict policy to defer additional features beyond the initial phase.
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