The federal government has intensified efforts to digitise Nigeria’s health system as part of broader reforms aimed at strengthening accountability, improving service delivery, and ensuring that health data is effectively used for decision-making.
The initiative includes plans to automate performance monitoring across health facilities and publish a nationwide list of digitised facilities as the country deepens its shift toward a data-driven health sector.
Speaking at the FASTR Programme Review Meeting and the launch of the Automated National Health Sector Scorecard in Abuja, the Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Anthony Adoghe, said the reforms are designed to eliminate manual bottlenecks in health sector performance tracking.
According to him, the ministry has successfully automated the development of health sector scorecards, replacing a previously manual system used to monitor performance indicators across the country.
“We had support for the scorecards and they were being developed every month. We said this is a digital age. We can actually take this off you. The FASTR team members immediately went to work and automated the scorecard development.”
He explained that the new system allows for real-time generation of scorecards at facility level once data is entered into the platform.
“Immediately you pull up the data, the system can automate the scorecard and generate even up to facility level. That is what you will be seeing here today, and we are very proud of that piece of work,” Adoghe added.
He said the automated scorecards would help stakeholders at all levels of government identify gaps in performance and take targeted action to address them.
“It essentially just shows you where the problems are, and you are able to focus on those problems, whether as local government authority, whether as facility or as a state,” he said.
Adoghe added that the Federal Government would also leverage the system to support states and local governments in addressing identified challenges in the health sector.
He disclosed that all facilities under the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF) are expected to be fully digitalised by the end of the month, while several states have already begun digitising public secondary health facilities.
“We’ve deployed and will continue to deploy EMR across facilities and hopefully by the end of this month, all BHCPF facilities will be digitalised,” he said.
“States have also said they will match us on this effort. A lot of states are now not just committing, but actually digitalising all public secondary facilities,” he added.
To enhance transparency, Adoghe said the ministry will publish a nationwide list of digitised health facilities to encourage accountability and wider adoption of digital systems.
“At the end of this month, we will have a list published for everybody to see all the facilities that have been digitalised,” he said.
He also noted that the government has strengthened the Health Facility Registry to curb inconsistencies and eliminate the existence of unverified health facilities.
“We’ve had cases of fictitious facilities springing up here and there. No more. If a facility is not verified all the way from the local government with images and everything, it doesn’t exist both to us and to the public,” he said.
Adoghe said the reforms reflect a broader shift toward a health system where data is routinely used to guide planning, policy, and interventions.
“Nobody was using data from the health sector for action. All we kept hearing was. It’s not of good quality, it’s not of good quality.’ But there was data flying here and there, from everywhere,” he said.
Also speaking at the event, the representative of the Global Financing Facility (GFF), Moussa Dieng, said Nigeria remains one of the organisation’s priority countries in advancing the use of data for health planning and public decision-making.
“We support the country to improve data and improve the use of the data to make public decisions,” he said.
Dieng added that the initiative is country-led, with development partners playing a supportive role in strengthening systems rather than driving external agendas.
“It’s a country led process. We are not here to make a specific agenda. Everything that we are doing in the country is making sure that we are supporting,” he said.
