If you're weighing GHIMS for your private, mission, or teaching hospital in Ghana, here's an honest comparison. GHIMS does a lot right in the public sector, and we'll be straight with you about where we think MediCare HIS is the better fit. Read it, follow the links to the evidence we publish, and decide for yourself.
"Ghana Health Information Management System" (GHIMS) is the name most clinicians use in conversation. The operational product behind it — built and supported by Lightwave Health Information Systems Ltd — is technically called LHIMS. Both names refer to the same thing in practice. Separately, DHIMS2 is the DHIS2-based aggregated reporting system at the Ministry of Health that every Ghana facility submits monthly counts to. DHIMS2 is not a clinical HIS — it sits above whichever operational system your facility uses (GHIMS, MediCare HIS, or any other).
Neither system is universally "better." They're shaped for different parts of the Ghanaian healthcare market, so the real question is which segment your facility belongs to.
The default at Ghana Health Service public facilities. Years of operational miles, deep NHIS integration in the public-sector configuration, mature DHIMS2 reporting pipeline, established Accra-based support.
Built for African private, mission and teaching hospitals. A modern interface, pricing you can see before you call, a security and compliance posture we publish, multi-payer billing, three deployment options, and automatic DHIMS2 submission with a tamper-evident audit trail.
Instead of claiming we're "better," here are three differences your IT, compliance, or finance team can verify in about ten minutes.
Our entire security and compliance evidence pack is public — Trust page at /security, ISO 27001:2022 gap analysis, NHS DSP Toolkit mapping (9 of 10 standards met today), and the named Clinical Safety Officer function modelled on the UK NHS framework. Your procurement committee can verify the claims without an NDA.
Your monthly MOH submission goes up automatically, and every submission is written to our tamper-evident audit chain backed by 7-year immutable off-host storage. If the Ministry ever disputes a figure, you have the matching record in storage. Nobody can change it after the fact, including our own engineers.
Starting prices are on the website. Three deployment options (cloud, on-premise, or a per-hospital server in your IT room), and a 90-day free trial on every paid plan. No opaque framework agreement, no quote cycle that drags on for months. See pricing · See deployment options.
We owe you the trade-offs, not just the pitch.
Yes — and we add an audit-grade evidence trail to every submission.
Every Ghana facility, public or private, is required to submit monthly aggregate counts to the Ministry of Health's DHIS2 instance (DHIMS2). MediCare HIS aggregates OPD attendance, inpatient admissions, lab tests, immunisations, and maternity outcomes from your operational records and submits them to DHIMS2 automatically each month via the official DHIS2 Web API. Per-facility mapping configuration is supported so the data elements match your specific GHS-issued UIDs.
Here's what we add on top. Every submission attempt, success or failure, is written to our tamper-evident audit chain and mirrored off-host to Backblaze B2 Object Lock storage with a 7-year retention guarantee. We capture the submission summary the DHIS2 server returns. So if a regulator or your compliance officer ever asks "did this facility submit September 2026's report, what numbers were in it, and when?" you can answer from immutable storage instead of taking the MOH portal's word for it.
Probably not. GHIMS is the GHS-recommended system and is deeply integrated with the public-sector framework. We don't try to displace it in that segment. If your facility is part of the GHS public network, the right answer is usually to stay with GHIMS.
That depends on what's pushing you to evaluate alternatives. Typical reasons we hear from private hospitals: claim-cycle pain (NHIS + private insurers + cash flow), workflow rigidity, lack of modern features like WhatsApp notifications and mobile money billing, or compliance and procurement requirements where the vendor's security posture needs to be independently verifiable. If any of those resonate, a 90-day free trial gives you a low-cost way to evaluate without disrupting your current operation.
We support NHIS claim submission alongside Glico, Acacia, Allianz, cash, and mobile money. Our private-hospital customers typically see their claim cycle drop from 60–90 days to roughly 14 days because we validate at submission rather than after rejection. We'd be happy to walk through your specific claim shape on a 30-minute call.
Yes. We offer three deployment options: cloud-hosted (the default), on-premise in your data centre, or a per-hospital server installed in your IT room. Compare deployment options. The per-hospital server install is popular with private hospitals that don't want patient data in any external cloud.
For a 50–100 bed private hospital, typical implementation is 4–8 weeks from contract sign to all departments live. CHAG and teaching hospitals are typically 8–12 weeks because of procurement-committee touchpoints and broader staff training. Onboarding and staff training are included on every paid plan. The 90-day free trial gives you a real working system on Day 1 — implementation is the process of getting your specific workflows and data into it.
Our public Trust page at medicarehis.com/security lists the active security controls, links to the ISO 27001:2022 Annex-A gap analysis, the NHS DSP Toolkit mapping, our incident response policy with response-time SLAs, and our RFC 9116 security.txt for responsible-disclosure. Your IT team can verify the claims in under ten minutes — no NDA required.
Enter the subdomain your IT team gave you. We'll redirect you to your hospital's secure login.