Eric Agyei, Senior Project Manager at Lightwave eHealthcare Solutions, the company implementing the nationwide Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS), has stated that the firm does not own or control the health data generated through its digital platform.
Speaking on the JoyNews AM Show on October 25, Mr. Agyei addressed growing public concern over the safety and management of health records following disruptions to the LHIMS platform—a system that, for more than a decade, has played a key role in digitising patient records and enhancing healthcare delivery across Ghana.
“Lightwave, I would say, is the company that will not engage—in fact, since our engagement with the Ministry, we have educated them a lot on how some of these things were being used in the past,” he explained. “We don’t own the data; it belongs to the Ministry of Health.”
His comments come amid challenges faced by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) and various public hospitals, many of which have been forced to revert to manual and semi-digital operations after interruptions to the LHIMS service.
The development has reignited debate about sustainability, accountability, and data sovereignty in Ghana’s digital health transformation.
Clarifying how the system functions, Mr. Agyei noted that LHIMS operates on a decentralised model where each hospital maintains its own infrastructure and database.
“It is for the facilities; every facility is autonomous. They have their own server and infrastructure and have their systems locally,” he stated.
He also highlighted that the company ensures real-time data backups to protect patient information and guarantee accessibility, even when patients move between facilities.
“The backups that we do in real time for the facilities, which also help with patients’ travel, are at the Ministry of Health in their server room,” he revealed.
Mr. Agyei’s remarks are part of ongoing efforts to reassure the public that patient data remains secure and under the full control of the Ministry of Health, despite recent disruptions to the national health information system.