On Thursday, 30 October 2025, Professor Titus Beyuo, Member of Parliament and Chair of the Board of Korle Bu Teaching Hospital (KBTH), publicly denounced the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS), calling it “unreliable, poorly supported and unfit for purpose”. His remarks followed widespread disruptions to the platform that led to operational paralysis in health-facilities across the country. According to the Ministry of Health, the breakdown was reportedly orchestrated by the system vendor as leverage to renegotiate critical contract clauses.
The disruptions to LHIMS caused significant delays in patient registration, billing, and record-keeping, forcing several hospitals — including Korle Bu and other major public facilities — to revert to manual, paper-based operations. Professor Beyuo told the media that he had been using the system and experiencing constant failures: complaints from staff about slow responses, missing hardware and a dependency on technical staff based in India were recurrent and unresolved. Meanwhile, Health Minister Kwabena Mintah Akandoh revealed that Ghana had signed a US$100 million contract with the vendor to connect 950 health-facilities to LHIMS; but by the end of the contract only 450 sites were connected, and key infrastructure remained under vendor control, hosted offshore.
Ghana’s Digital System
Digital health systems are central to efficient, equitable healthcare delivery. The failure of the LHIMS rollout means Ghana’s vision of a streamlined national electronic-medical-records system has been put on hold — undermining efforts in patient-care continuity, data-driven planning and cost control. Across Africa, where health-systems are under pressure and infrastructure weak, this incident serves as a warning that high-cost digital platforms do not automatically translate into operational gains. Contract design, local ownership, capacity building and infrastructure must all align.
Ghana’s e-health strategy has been under development for years; a 2022 strategy document emphasised the need for information systems, interoperability and rural access. LHIMS was deployed in major tertiary and regional hospitals starting around 2019, but network issues in peripheral facilities had already been flagged. In January 2025 an investigation found that while LHIMS operated smoothly at KBTH and Accra Regional Hospital, hospitals outside the capital reported network breakdowns that caused patient refusals and delays.
As Ghana’s leading tertiary referral hospital, Korle Bu hosts over 1,500 out-patient visits daily. Its struggles with LHIMS underscore the risk: “we gradually lost aspects of the software, and at one point, it went completely black,” Prof Beyuo said. Until LHIMS stabilised, staff there had to keep paper backups and revert to manual systems — slowing service delivery and increasing risk of errors.
Minister Akandoh announced that the government has procured a new platform — the Ghana Healthcare Information Management System (GHIMS) — and set a four-week “roll-out” timeframe: during the first week teaching and regional hospitals will migrate; week two covers district hospitals; week three covers clinics, health centres and CHPS compounds; and week four completes the transition. He stressed that the era of returning to purely manual records is over.
- Integration risk: Migrating large volumes of existing data from LHIMS to GHIMS without loss or disruption will be complex.
- Infrastructure gaps: Many district and rural hospitals reported weak networks under LHIMS — the new rollout must address connectivity and power issues.
- Contracting reform: The situation exposed deficiencies in contract design, vendor-dependency, and offshore-hosting of national health-data infrastructure.
- User training and hardware supply: Long-standing user complaints about missing hardware and delayed fixes under LHIMS need urgent rectification to avoid repeat failures.
While the failure of LHIMS marks a serious setback for Ghana’s digital-health ambitions, the government’s rapid pivot to a new system underlines recognition of the urgency. If the GHIMS rollout is executed with strengthened infrastructure, clearer governance, and sufficient local support, it could mark a turning point. However, the next four weeks will be critical: the health-system cannot afford another system collapse.
Read also: Okoe-Boye Urges Mediation in $100m Health Data Dispute — Says Ghana Risks Losing LHIMS Gains
