Nigeria develops digital health architecture to integrate health systems

Nigeria has moved from building isolated digital health applications to developing a unified National Digital Health Architecture (NDHA) that will transform the health sector.

The Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Iziaq Salako, made this known while delivering the opening address at the 5th Africa Healthtech Summit on Wednesday at the Kigali Convention Centre in Rwanda.

Mr Salako said Africa has proven it can innovate with electronic medical records, telemedicine and Artificial Intelligence tools, but the real challenge is connecting those innovations into sustainable national systems.

“Through the Nigeria Digital in Health Initiative, we have developed a National Digital Health Architecture (NDHA), endorsed through our National Council on Health by the sub-national government to establish the national blueprint and the rules by which our digital health ecosystem should evolve,” he said.

He said under President Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria Health Sector Renewal Investment Initiative (NHSRII), being implemented through a Sector-Wide Approach (SWAp), digital transformation is being treated as a cross-cutting enabler for better service delivery, governance, financing and health outcomes.

Centralised health system

The Minister noted that for years, investments in digital health created valuable but programme-specific solutions that could not communicate with one another, with different electronic medical records operating without common standards.

To address this, Mr Salako said the federal government, through the Nigeria Digital in Health Initiative, has developed the NDHA, endorsed by the National Council on Health, as the national blueprint for a secure and interoperable ecosystem.

The architecture, he said, is built around a Health Information Exchange with a Shared Health Record and national registries for clients, health facilities and health workers, anchored on the principle of “one patient, one health record.”

According to him, the country is already recording dividends at the sub-national level, with telemedicine bridging gaps and bringing doctors to rural families.

To strengthen governance, Mr Tinubu recently established the National Health Technology and Data Analytics Office to coordinate the digital health agenda, harmonise public and private institutions, and supervise the operationalisation of the NDHA.

Mr Salako stressed that building intelligent infrastructure must come before Artificial Intelligence, warning that AI cannot compensate for fragmented data, weak standards and non-interoperable systems.

He said Africa must not remain a mere consumer of health technology but must define standards, govern its data, and build local capacity.

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“Our partners must work to strengthen national systems rather than create parallel ones. Every investment should leave behind stronger institutions and infrastructure that governments can sustain beyond the life of a project or grant,” he said.

He added that digital ambition must ultimately be about people, the pregnant woman receiving safer care because information reaches the right health worker at the right time, the child whose vaccination history is not lost after relocation, and the health worker freed from repetitive forms to focus on patient care.

“Our ambition should not simply be to digitise healthcare but to build health systems that can learn, connect, anticipate and respond,” Mr Salako said.

He reaffirmed Nigeria’s commitment to collaborate with other African nations, stressing that “if we get this right, Africa will not simply participate in the future of digital health; Africa will help define it.”