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Showing posts from June, 2016

eHealth: Can ICTs bring the doctor closer to patients?

KWAMI AHIABENU 15 JUNE 2016 Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), play an important role in improving healthcare delivery by providing new, innovative and efficient ways of connecting the patient to the doctor. They support quality care delivery by producing better data sets for information and knowledge management, assist in disease prevention and treatment; health monitoring,  diagnostic Information systems, supporting health system management processes including (planning, budget and financial functions) and supporting the emergency, ambulatory, organ donation systems as well as the disaster management systems and blood banks. What is eHealth?  According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), eHealth is the use of ICT for health delivery including treating patients, conducting research, educating the health workforce, tracking diseases and monitoring public health.  Telemedicine is a specific type of e-Health, where medical information exchanged from one site to ano

PenPlusBytes, BloggingGhana, caution Ghana's Inspector General of Police on social media ban

BloggingGhana, a membership-based grass-roots social media organisation, and PenPlusBytes, a non-profit organisation committed to enhancing governance by deepening citizens' participation through ICT, have expressed deep concern over the proposal of the Inspector General of Police (IGPs) to shut down social media platforms on election day. "We share in the IGP's sentiments about the excesses and security concerns that might come with the use of social media. However, a ban on social media is not the solution and such a ban will be a breach of citizens' freedom of expression, a basic tenet of democracy,'' the group stated. In a statement, the group cited Article 21(a) of Ghana's 1992 Constitution which grants all citizens "freedom of speech and expression, which shall include freedom of the press and other media." Elections in Ghana, the group noted,  had largely been considered free and fair because of citizen and media parti

Understanding cloud computing

By Kwami Ahiabenu, II  Computing was formerly linked to physical spaces. Today, everything is in the cloud. In those days, computer or server rooms usually housed huge computing devices.  With the advent of cloud computing, however, users can have access to momentous computing power without huge investment. Cloud computing is an internet-based computing which enables shared processing capacity, storage space, data, software, applications and other resources to computers and other devices on demand through the "clouds", which is a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing is similar to grid computing, which describes a situation where unused computing capacity in a network is harnessed to tackle problems too intensive for typical home or office computers.  How does it work? The main idea of cloud computing is to deliver traditional high-performance computing power, usually available to military, research or academic institutions, with the ability to perform tens of trillions