Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
As we enter today’s digital transformation era, it is clear that the revolution in information technology (IT) across various domains of human endeavours has been unprecedented. Today, everyone appears to want information to become ubiquitous so that timely and accurate information would be readily available and accessible to significantly enhance the worker’s productivity (e.g., Lemai et al., 2014; Polock, 2000; Brynjolfsson & Yang, 1996). In advanced economies such as the United States (US), the transformation of daily work processes has been accelerated via the aids of IT adoption and deployment while in the less developed or developing economies, the challenge of IT adoption, development and deployment to improve the local livelihood of residents and, more importantly, promote their general health and community well being are gradually being picked up (Ponelis & Holmner, 2015; Ejiaku, 2014).
Regardless, while information is critical in every sphere of life, it is even more germane for the healthcare sector where life has often been at stake. As the provision of accurate, reliable and relevant information at the time as needed or called for can greatly enhance the productivity of healthcare personnel such as physicians who have to diagnose patients in a timely manner (Sidek and Martins, 2017), the effective adoption of IT to improve health information processing cannot simply be ignored.To date, hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa are still relying on a snail-paced, manual method of record keeping for patients’ case-notes. Challenges associated with such manual case-notes practices include potential information mutilation, paper defacing, tearing and decaying and even total loss of the critical patient information in transit as the patient moves within the different hospital units. Not surprisingly, such incidents are commonly reported in many of the Sub-Saharan African hospitals (Olajubu et al., 2010; Idowu et al., 2004; Chattoraj et al., 2004). Key challenges noted have rendered hospitals in this sub-region of Africa relatively ineffective as the sector has witnessed longstanding low productivity. For this reason, among others, the elite in the region has chosen, for any slight illness, to travel abroad for medical treatment.