Ghana cannot stay silent while 14 million medical records vanish into a digital void

More than 14.2 million patient medical records, the very lifeline of health care in this country are now trapped in a digital blackout. And yet, Ghana remains eerily calm. No national uproar. No emergency parliamentary session. No presidential address. Just silence, as if losing years of sensitive medical data is a mild inconvenience and not a full-scale public health crisis.

The Lightwave Health Information Management System (LHIMS) was supposed to be our gateway to a modern health sector, a unified digital platform deployed across teaching, regional and district hospitals to replace the era of brown folders, missing files, and handwritten notes. It promised efficiency, speed, security and accuracy. Instead, it has become the epicentre of a disaster unfolding quietly in our hospital

For weeks, doctors and nurses across the country have abandoned computers and picked up exercise books. Long queues snake through facilities, patients wait helplessly for care, and health workers struggle with handwritten folders as if the system never existed. Some hospitals confirm they have lost all patient data since 2023, treatment plans, medication history, diagnoses, lab results, everything.

Yet we do not see the collective outrage this moment demands.

The shutdown of LHIMS is a crisis of governance, accountability and national security. Medical data is not an optional convenience; it is the foundation of clinical decision-making. Without a patient’s medical history, a doctor is effectively treating blindly. Allergies are unknown. Past medications are uncertain. Previous diagnoses are guesswork.

Imagine a patient in critical care whose last known medication interacts fatally with a new prescription. Imagine a cancer patient whose treatment plan disappears. Imagine a child whose allergy record cannot be found. These are not hypotheticals they are happening right now in wards across the country.

The Ministry insists it demanded full control of the data something every sovereign state has the right to ensure. If this account is accurate, how did Ghana sign a contract that left national health data in the hands of a private contractor? Why were there no safeguards? Who failed to enforce the Data Protection Act? How did an entire health system become dependent on a vendor’s goodwill?

Lightwave denies wrongdoing and claims the data is safely stored on local hospital servers and at the Ministry’s data centre in Accra. But if the data is so secure, why can’t hospitals access it? Why has care delivery collapsed? Why have patient histories vanished? Someone is not telling the full story and the public deserves the truth.

The Data Protection Commission’s investigation began far too late, and even now the country is yet to see decisive action or clear conclusions. If this were banking data or voter information, Ghana would be in crisis mode. But health records the most intimate, sensitive and life-critical data we possess disappear, and the nation shrugs.

The silence from civil society is also deafening. This is not just a health story; it is a national crisis. If 14.2 million banking records disappeared, the country would be in flames. If 14.2 million EC voter records vanished, Parliament would reconvene overnight. But 14.2 million health records? Ghana shrugs.

This silence shows how deeply we belittle health data. We behave as though medical records are simply scribbles in a folder not the blueprint of a person’s life, medical trajectory, and survival. This is not only about LHIMS. It is a warning shot. If we do not demand accountability today, the same negligence will destroy future biometric systems, national IDs, tax platforms and digital public services.

This crisis is far bigger than Lightwave and far bigger than the Ministry of Health. It is a national lesson in how easily a country loses what it fails to safeguard. Fourteen million medical records cannot disappear into a contractual dispute and be treated as business as usual. Ghana must demand answers, demand accountability, and reclaim its data because this silence is not only irresponsible. It is dangerous. And it is costing lives.

By: Fred Tettey Djabanor, Head of Current Affairs at Channel One TV and Citi FM