Accra, May 5, GNA – The Ministry of Health has initiated the Data Production Management and Use (DPMU) project, to improve processes and tools for data access and their effective use in all decision-making and performance monitoring across the health value chain.
The project which entails data that support the management of public health supply chain products would contribute to the enhancement of resource management in support of healthcare delivery.
This was contained in a press release signed by Dr Wisdom Atiwoto, Director, Research, Statistics and Information Management at the Ministry of Health and copied to the Ghana News Agency.
“It is anticipated that the fostering of such enabling supply chain environment will lead Ghana towards the attainment of health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including universal health coverage (UHC),” he said.
The reforms would fully support objectives for a stronger national health system: “In addition to implementing the supply chain reforms and digitization initiatives, the health sector has been increasingly tested by new challenges like pandemics. This has led to the urgent need to establish a foundation to build a dynamic and resilient system as well as strengthen systems and structures that can aptly respond to these challenges”, he said.
He again said that one of the principles of this transformation agenda was making available modern innovation technology, including information management systems, to provide data available across the supply chain to enable better decisions on risk management and performance improvement.
He stated that the agenda was also to make it easy to access the data of the supply chain to drive strategic decision-making with the aim of creating and sustaining superior performance in the health sector.
Dr Atiwoto said that the development of a five-year Strategic Supply Chain Master Plan (SCMP) in 2012 and its subsequent revision in 2015 to better address prevailing implementation challenges formed the bedrock for the structural transformation of the organisations that ensures the availability of health commodities to the people who need them.
“The ultimate aspect will be developing platforms that will support analytics and visualization to guide critical decision support. S4D will look at how can the Ministry use data effectively to facilitate getting insights from all the information put together. It is anticipated that modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be used in the near future to guide both visibility, analytics and decision making”, he stated.