HELINA 2015

The 9th Health Informatics in Africa Conference – HELINA 2015 took place in Accra, Ghana, from the 7th to the 11th of October 2015. The conference was co-organized by HELINA and the Ghana Health Informatics Association (GHIA), who hosted the event.

GHIA is a national platform for health informatics activities in Ghana, with membership drawn from corporate bodies, professionals, and researchers involved in Health, Insurance, Medical Informatics, Public Health, and Computer Science in Ghana from within and outside the country. GHIA is a member of the Pan African Health Informatics in Africa Association (HELINA) and the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

The HELINA 2015 conference was a success and saw experts in healthcare, ICT, Telecommunications and Microelectronic, governance, industry leaders, eHealth, public health management, biomedicine/health informatics, medicine, and students come together for the four-day event.

The HELINA 2015 conference aimed to:

• Highlight the role of Health Informatics applications for the Universal Health Coverage in Africa
• Promote the development and implementation of an African eHealth strategic policy and eHealth architecture in African countries.
• Showcase best practices in Health Informatics –incl. ehealth and telemedicine- and its application in Africa: implemented health data standards and interoperable solutions, hospital information system, electronic health/medical/patient records, clinical decision support systems, monitoring and evaluation systems, registers, data mining, big data analytics, and reporting platforms, health insurance, and electronic claims processing among others
• How to translate research and innovations into an improved healthcare delivery system
• Foster the creation of networks between African Countries as well as eHealth initiatives in Africa
• Foster the development of Health Informatics research and education in Africa.

Through research and project reports on Health Informatics for the Universal Health Coverage in Africa, the conference focused on solutions that can develop health-informatics or ehealth-based solutions for sustainable healthcare access in Africa.

As such, the conference had a particular focus on consolidating its existing working groups –WG Education, WG Standards and Interoperability, WG Data Mining, and Big Data Analytics– as well as initiating, building and consolidating networks among participants from different African states.

The 2015 conference allowed attendees to attend interactive/brainstorming workshops, panel discussions, focus group sessions, and ice-breaking/’meet-and-greet’ opportunities.

In addition, the conference allowed attendees to present research papers or work-in-progress papers to the HELINA panel.

HELINA thanks all the participants who attended the conference. In addition, HELINA thanks GHIA and the local organizing committee for their dedicated effort in making the event a success.