The car crash involving former heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua and the death of the son of famous novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cast a renewed spotlight on the state of Nigeria’s health sector. The headlines and thousands of social media posts sounded desperate calls for help to fix what’s broken.  

Shortages dominate the narrative: doctors and nurses are constantly joining the japa wave to flee to Europe and America. Those that choose to stay back are stretched to breaking. Everyone also agrees that  funding is a mess, especially when you contrast that against the constant pilfering by the ruling class. 

Personnel are scarce but the rot is not just about thin workforce and sparse funding. Lack of data, or say lack of information is throwing a spanner in the works, more than we can care to accept. Decisions that impact lives of more than 200 million people are sometimes birthed by guesswork, with reliable, timely data being more of a myth than reality. This is evident in the allegations Adichie levelled against the highbrow hospital where her son died. 

It is no longer news that patients often suffer repeats of tests they’ve already endured. Planners stockpile the wrong supplies. Mothers die on referral routes because no one knows their story. Data isn’t a side issue; it’s the invisible killer holding Nigeria’s health system hostage.​

Picture this: a woman in Lagos, pregnant with her third child, starts at a government-owned primary healthcare centre. Routine check-up flags complications such as high blood pressure, maybe preeclampsia. She is then referred to a maternal and child centre some kilometres away. She arrives, breathless, clutching a crumpled paper file that’s half-soaked from the rain. The admitting doctor stares blankly. No digital record. No prior labs. No ultrasound images from last week. “Start over,” they say. Blood tests again. Urine analysis repeated. An hour wasted, costs doubled, risk climbing. This isn’t fiction. In Nigeria, fragmented patient records across public and private facilities force this chaos daily. 

Data are extremely siloed in ways that hurt patients than help the system.  A 2023 health financing assessment by the World Bank highlighted how siloed paper systems lead to duplicated diagnostics, with rural patients undergoing the same malaria smears multiple times in a single month, siphoning up to 15% of already thin budgets on redundant work. Private hospitals won’t share with public ones; neither talks to the next. Result? Waste piles up, outcomes stagnate.​

Zoom out to maternal health, where the stakes pierce the heart. Nigeria’s maternal mortality rate hovers around 814 deaths per 100,000 live births, one of the world’s worst. Referrals compound the tragedy. A woman from a village in Kaduna gets shipped to Kano for emergency care. No documented history travels with her. Was she anaemic? Hypertensive? Did she receive antenatal iron? Doctors guess, improvise, pray. In 2024, during a spike in northern maternal referrals tied to flooding, health ministry reports noted over 40% arrived without records, forcing blind restarts that delayed interventions by hours—hours too many mothers didn’t have. Real lives: A case from Punch Healthwise detailed a 28-year-old in Ogun State who bled out post-referral because her eclampsia history sat trapped in a primary health center’s notebook, unshared and unreadable. Fragmentation isn’t inefficiency; it’s lethal.​

Now, health planning often relies on datasets that are out of touch with reality. Officials in Abuja and state houses crunch numbers for national budgets. How many nurses for Enugu? Beds for Kano? Vaccines for the northeast? They lean on estimates from five years ago, surveys riddled with gaps. No real-time pulse on utilisation. 

During the 2024 Lassa fever outbreak in Bauchi and Plateau states, planners overstocked antivirals but undersupplied fluids and diagnostics because clinic-level data on patient flows stayed locked in local ledgers, unintegrated and unseen. Thousands of cases later, excess drugs expired while frontline workers begged for basics. Brain drain has worsened it. More than 5,000 doctors left Nigeria in 2024 alone, chasing better pay abroad. However, without reliable granular data on vacancy hotspots or burnout drivers, funding will not solve the problem. Strikes paralyse wards yearly; a 2025 Nigerian Medical Association report pegged losses at N500 billion from unstaffed facilities, all because planners couldn’t pinpoint demand via dashboards. Guesses breed more guesses. Crisis deepens.​

Turn to the United States, where data isn’t perfect but flows like blood in veins. Electronic health records (EHRs) bind the chaos. Kaiser Permanente, serving 12 million across nine states, exemplifies it. A patient transfers from Oakland to San Diego? Doctors tap a screen—full history loads: medications, allergies, genetic markers, even social determinants like housing instability. Redundant tests? Slashed by 20-30% in peer-reviewed studies, saving $10 billion annually system-wide. Maternal referrals shine here too: High-risk pregnancies trigger alerts in Epic Systems software, used by over 250 million Americans. Dashboards flag patterns—say, gestational diabetes clusters—and route cases with digital summaries intact. No lost files. In 2023, Kaiser’s data-driven pathways cut preterm births by 12% in vulnerable populations.​

Staffing gets the same treatment. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, deploys real-time analytics from its EHR backbone. Predictive models forecast ER surges based on flu trends, weather, even local events. They hire temps ahead, balance shifts, oversee quality through automated audits tracking infection rates or readmissions. During COVID peaks, Mayo’s dashboards shaved ventilator wait times by 40%, guiding federal aid precisely. Performance oversight? Baked in. Hospitals face Medicare penalties for poor metrics, for instance, readmission rates above 15% trigger clawbacks, pushing relentless improvement. While it’s not utopia; interoperability lags between rival systems and costs balloon, yet the edge is clear: data turns reaction into strategy.​

Nigeria needn’t swallow America whole. That will not work given power outages, bandwidth deserts, and billion-dollar price tags. But we can adapt smartly. Start with pilots echoing U.S. examples but fitted to Naija’s environment. Enugu State’s 2024 maternal EHR trial digitised 10,000 records across 50 facilities, slashing referral gaps by 25% in early data. Link that to national dashboards, open-source like DHIS2, already in play for some immunisation tracking. Cost? Peanuts, next to waste. Imagine rechannelling N100 billion yearly from duplicate tests into secure servers and training. Public-private hybrids, like Lagos’ Helium Health network, already interconnect 1,500 facilities; scale it federally.

Real-life proof closer home: Rwanda digitised community health records post-genocide, dropping maternal deaths 70% in a decade via mobile-linked dashboards. Nigeria, with deeper pockets, could mirror that lean.  Train community officers in data entry, turning ash from strikes into info warriors. Personnel return when systems work; data proves where incentives hit hardest.

Funding fights symptoms. Data cures the disease. Pour billions into hospitals without info streams, and you’re building on sand. 

Dr Adewumi is a US-based health informatics professional and researcher combining frontline implementation experience with quantitative methods to measure impact at scale.