Overcoming barriers of effective health care delivery and electronic health records in Nigeria using socialized medicine

Health care system in Nigeria is currently in a state of anomie, preventable and curable diseases such as maternal mortality, diabetes, high blood pressure and other controllable diseases have been shockingly high. At the heart of transformation is the electronic medical record (EMR) which integrates patient´s data and information, from registration to billing and payment into a single electronic record. With these, health care providers can easily and dynamically improve quality of care while at the same time lowering their cost. Despite the great characteristics of cloud computing, they haven´t been utilized fairly yet in the health care industry. The use of online social networks explores an infrastructure with reduced initial costs and rapid application development. Facebook and Twitter can be used as an example of remote monitoring because of its flexibility; user defined applications and can be modified to suit requirements of patients and other health care stakeholders. Our main observation is that both patients and providers express an overall high interest in using electronic health record (EHR) systems that utilizes principles of social networking to help them communicate with each other and manage medications and also track health records such that an emergency room of an hospital in Kano, Nigeria would have immediate access to your full medical history from your profile via the social network and our major priority is to look for new ways to communicate with patients. Finally, this paper explores the significance of Socialized medicine on the Nigerian Health care delivery system and also presents a technology based framework towards overcoming barriers in health care delivery and the provision of how the principles of social networking could be applied to current and future expectations for the Nigerian Health sector.