A deepening rift has emerged within the health sector over the fate of the Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS), as former Minister of Health, Dr. Bernard Okoe Boye, has launched a scathing rebuttal against his successor, Kwabena Mintah Akandoh, accusing him of waging a campaign to discredit his predecessors and dismantle a functioning national digital health system for political or commercial motives.
In a detailed statement titled “The LHIMS Controversy: A Case of Giving the Dog a Bad Name to Hang It,” Dr. Okoe Boye chronicled the origins, progress, and achievements of the National e-Health Project, describing the current administration’s narrative as “a deliberate distortion of facts designed to justify the introduction of a new vendor.”
National e-Health Project
According to Dr. Okoe Boye, the National e-Health Project — aimed at digitizing and networking all public health facilities in Ghana — was launched in 2016 after a contract was signed between the Ministry of Health (MoH) and Lightwave e-Healthcare Solutions Ltd, a Ghanaian technology company.
Phase One of the project covered 25 facilities in the Central Region and was hailed as a success, leading to government’s decision to expand it nationwide under Phase Two.
In 2018, the Ministry sought and obtained approval from the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) for a sole-sourced contract worth $186.79 million.
However, following a Value-for-Money Audit by the Ministry of Finance, the cost was reduced to $100 million, which became the official project value.
The nationwide contract was signed on March 29, 2019, with a three-year duration. But the rollout faced delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply-chain bottlenecks, and infrastructural challenges at some facilities.
Consequently, the project timeline was extended twice — first to April 2023, and later to December 2024.
Oversight for the project was provided by a National Steering Committee chaired by the Health Minister and including the Ghana Health Service Director-General, MoH’s IT Directorate, and the CEOs of teaching hospitals.
The approved $100 million contract covered three key areas:
Networking of 950 public health facilities;
Training of health professionals — more than 150,000 workers to date; and
Provision of continuous technical support and maintenance.
Dr. Okoe Boye said that as of December 2024, Lightwave had successfully digitized 450 facilities, including 4 teaching hospitals, 6 regional hospitals, 243 district and municipal hospitals, 2 psychiatric hospitals, 49 polyclinics, and 157 health centres.
The remaining work, he noted, was roughly equivalent to the workload of three major teaching hospitals.
Financially, payments toward the project were split 62% by the Ministry of Finance and 38% by the National Health Insurance Authority (NHIA) — totaling $76.99 million, with $23 million outstanding and an unutilized advance of $10.6 million earmarked for completion of the remaining phase.
“False Claims and Political Spin”
The former minister devoted a significant portion of his statement to refuting what he called “false and politically motivated claims” made by his successor.
He first dismissed assertions that Lightwave is a foreign company, stressing that “Lightwave e-Healthcare Solutions Ltd is a wholly Ghanaian-owned firm, incorporated in 2015.”
On allegations that Lightwave deliberately shut down the LHIMS system to sabotage operations, Dr. Okoe Boye clarified that the company merely informed the Ministry of the expiry of its contract and sought renewal.
The Ministry, he said, declined to extend the agreement and ignored the contract’s dispute resolution clauses, which required unresolved matters to be referred to a third-party adjudicator within 28 days.
“Instead of following due process,” Okoe Boye wrote, “the Minister unilaterally engaged a new vendor without transparency, justification, or adherence to procurement protocols.”
He also described as “baseless” the claim that Ghana’s health data was being hosted in India.
According to him, each health facility under LHIMS maintains local servers, while backups are stored at the MoH data centre at the Ministry’s headquarters in Accra. “Our data has never left Ghana,” he emphasized.
Similarly, the accusation that Lightwave supplied inferior equipment was also refuted. “The contract specifications did not require particular brands but performance standards — and those were fully met,” he stated.
GHIMS and the Alleged Duplication of Effort
Dr. Okoe Boye also took aim at the government’s newly announced Ghana Health Information Management System (GHIMS), which is being promoted as a state-owned replacement for LHIMS.
He argued that GHIMS “is not a government platform” but another private-sector entity, similar to Lightwave, with little proven capacity.
“GHIMS has so far digitized fewer than five facilities, yet it is being positioned to replace a system that has already networked over 450 hospitals and trained more than 150,000 health workers,” he stated.
“If even 20% of the cost of the Lightwave contract is now spent duplicating existing work, it would constitute gross financial waste.”
The former minister warned that such duplication risks not only wasting public funds but also undermining data security and continuity of care for over 25 million Ghanaians whose medical records are already integrated into the system.
Governance And Legal Concerns
Dr. Okoe Boye further accused the Ministry of Health of violating governance and legal procedures, including denying Lightwave access to the audit report that formed the basis for the system’s termination.
He described as improper the decision to refer the dispute to the Attorney-General’s Department, which he said cannot serve as both government’s legal adviser and an independent adjudicator.
“The Ministry’s unilateral decision to terminate the contract and replace a functioning national health data system not only threatens service delivery but also exposes the country to potential legal and financial risks,” he warned.
