Harnessing E-healthcare Technologies for Equitable Healthcare Delivery in Nigeria: The Way Forward

While the traditional model of healthcare, training and medical research in Nigeria had fairly served us well, adaptation is needed in the 21st century to accommodate the ever-increasing demand for health care and the growing population. Though right to affordable healthcare and medical facilities is provided by our local laws, however, it remains a dream as some of those provisions are non-justiciable. Over the last decade the Nigerian society has become increasingly dependent on technological advancement following the growth in the spread of Computing, Information communications technology, and Mobile devices (CIM). CIM has recorded unprecedented heights permeating and revolutionizing the various areas of human endeavour and social relations leading to what may be called an e-society the result of which is highly delineated social boundaries making distance a matter of personal interpretation. Having regard to the potentials of CIM, this paper discusses the right of the citizenry to healthcare, the place of, merits, and problems of e-healthcare in public healthcare delivery in Nigeria. Our aim is to expose the potentials of CIM, and how it could be made to contribute significantly towards solving the myriad of problems facing effective healthcare in Nigeria. We adopted a descriptive desk approach using standard databases on healthcare, legislations, relevant public documents from public health authorities in Nigeria, and experiential knowledge on CIM to put forward a simple objective solution. Our solution is greatly hinged on the governments political will to implement an e-healthcare infrastructure through the creation of an implementable policy document.