The Ministry of Health has reaffirmed that Ghana’s electronic medical records under the National E-Healthcare Programme are not hosted on local servers, contrary to claims made by Lightwave E-Healthcare Solutions Limited, the private company behind the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS).
Speaking in an interview on Joy FM’s Newsnight on Monday, the Ministry’s Public Relations Officer, Tony Goodman, said the government currently has no access to the main data servers, adding that ongoing efforts to reconstruct medical data are evidence of that fact.
“That is not correct. We even had a meeting today [Monday November 3] with the technical officers, including those who were on the project, and they told us again that they don’t have access to the service or the data,” he said.
“What Lightwave is referring to is called a backup server, which is not the main server hosting the data. The server is not in Ghana because we don’t have access. Our technical officers have no control over the system that was running,” he added.
According to Mr. Goodman, the backup servers located in hospitals and other health facilities are non-functional and cannot serve as data repositories.
“The backup servers at the facilities are what we call on-site servers. Even information from NITA confirms that those servers are just there; they are not storing anything. The original, or mother server, is not in this country and not in the Ministry of Health,” he clarified.
His remarks follow a rebuttal by Lightwave E-Healthcare Solutions, which on Thursday, October 30, rejected comments made by the Minister of Health, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, in Parliament and at the Presidential Accountability Series, claiming that Ghana’s health data was being managed remotely from India.
Lightwave described the Minister’s assertion as inaccurate and misleading, insisting that all patient data remains securely stored within a central repository at the Ministry’s data centre in Accra.
The company emphasised that while the Ministry of Health retains ownership of the data, the LHIMS software remains Lightwave’s proprietary platform licensed to government under a formal agreement.
However, Mr. Goodman maintained that the Ministry’s position is based on technical verification, not conjecture.
“We are reconstructing data. If we already had access to the full data set, why would we be doing that? This is a fact, and we have put it out there for the people of this country to know,” he stated.
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