INDUSTRIES

Health

Teaching hospitals, federal medical centres, state hospital boards and private clinics use BrilliantCare and our infrastructure practice to shorten waiting times, get claims paid and report to the health authorities on time.

What Actually Slows a Nigerian Hospital Down

Walk into the out-patient department of a busy Nigerian teaching hospital at eight in the morning and the queue is not primarily a clinical problem. It is a records problem. The folder has to be found in a physical shelf, matched to a patient whose name may be spelt three ways across three visits, carried by hand to the consulting room, then carried again to the laboratory and the pharmacy. Every one of those hops is a queue. Hospitals we have measured were spending an average of 168 minutes per out-patient visit, of which under 20 minutes involved a clinician. Digitising the folder does not cure the workforce shortage, but it returns a substantial part of the day to the people who are actually short.

Money is the second pressure. Under the National Health Insurance Authority arrangements, hospitals are paid for enrolee care through claims, and claims are rejected for reasons that are almost always administrative: missing enrolee verification, an unlisted procedure code, a missing authorisation for a referral, an incomplete encounter record. We have seen rejection rates above 20 per cent at hospitals whose clinical care was perfectly sound. Each rejection is weeks of working capital and hours of a records officer’s time. A system that validates the enrolee, enforces the coding and refuses to close an encounter with a missing field fixes most of it at source.

Third is reporting and the physical environment. Facilities are obliged to report through DHIS2 to state and federal health authorities, and where that reporting is compiled by hand from tally sheets at month end it is both late and unreliable. Meanwhile the clinical environment itself is hostile to computing: mains supply that fails several times a day, generator changeover that resets equipment, dust, and wards where a workstation cannot be sited conveniently. We design for it — power conditioning and battery backup at every clinical node, wireless coverage engineered for concrete wards, rugged devices at triage, and local operation that survives a network drop without losing an encounter.

What We Deliver for Health Institutions

Six offerings covering the clinical record, the revenue cycle, statutory reporting and the infrastructure underneath all of it.

Hospital Information System

BrilliantCare

Patient registration, triage, consultation notes, orders and results, pharmacy, ward management, theatre scheduling and billing in one record, with unique patient identification across visits.

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Claims & Revenue Cycle

NHIA and HMOs

Enrolee verification at the point of care, procedure coding enforcement, authorisation tracking, batch submission and rejection analytics so the same error is not repeated next month.

DHIS2 & Statutory Reporting

Automated returns

Monthly service data generated from the clinical record rather than from tally sheets, mapped to DHIS2 data elements and submitted on schedule, with a reconciliation view for the records department.

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Power-Resilient Clinical Infrastructure

Ward to data centre

Structured cabling, wireless coverage engineered for concrete wards, power conditioning and battery backup at every clinical node, and a small on-site data room that survives generator changeover.

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Biomedical Asset Tracking

BrilliantTrack

Register, location and maintenance history for biomedical equipment, with service-due alerts and downtime reporting, so a ₦40m analyser is not idle for months awaiting an unrecorded service call.

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Health Data Protection

NDPA 2023

Role-based access to clinical records, break-glass procedures with mandatory justification, full access auditing and the impact assessment the Nigeria Data Protection Commission expects.

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Health Sector Delivery

National Scheme

The National Health Insurance Authority

Delivered Components

Enrolee app, admin platform, card client

Administrative Modules

Enrolment through compliance reporting

Populations Served

Enrolees and scheme administrators

Health Sector Obligations

The requirements a Nigerian health facility must meet, and the part of the work we take on.

Requirement	Authority or standard	What it obliges	What we provide
Enrolee claims and reimbursement	National Health Insurance Authority and accredited HMOs	Verified enrolee identity, correct procedure coding, complete encounter documentation, submission within the claim window	Point-of-care verification, coding enforcement, authorisation tracking, batch submission and rejection analytics
Routine service reporting	Federal and state health authorities via DHIS2	Monthly service data reported against defined data elements to schedule	Automated generation from the clinical record, DHIS2 element mapping, reconciliation view and submission calendar
Patient records and confidentiality	National Health Act 2014; professional council guidance	Accurate records, defined retention, confidentiality of health information	Unique patient identification, retention policy configuration, role-based access with full audit of every record view
Health data protection	Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023; NDPC	Lawful basis for processing sensitive personal data, impact assessment, breach notification	Data protection impact assessment, encryption at rest and in transit, break-glass access with mandatory justification
Drug and consumable control	Pharmacy Council of Nigeria; NAFDAC listing requirements	Traceability of dispensed items, batch and expiry control, controlled-substance registers	Pharmacy module with batch and expiry tracking, dispensing audit and controlled-item registers
Quality and clinical governance	Facility accreditation and internal clinical audit	Evidence of clinical audit, incident reporting and outcome monitoring	Structured clinical audit extracts, incident register and outcome dashboards from live encounter data
Local IT provider requirements	NITDA indigenous provider guidelines	Public facilities must engage registered indigenous providers for qualifying IT spend	NITDA-registered indigenous provider; clearance documentation prepared with the facility

Reference Deployment: A National Health Insurance Platform

A national health insurance authority has two populations to serve and they want opposite things. The enrolee wants a card that works, a clinic that accepts it and a clear answer about what is covered. The authority wants enrolment integrity, claims that can be adjudicated, facilities that can be held to a standard, and returns it can defend. Systems built for one of those populations tend to fail the other.

We built for both against a single record. The citizen-facing side is a mobile application covering enrolee authentication and profile, health records and vitals, appointment scheduling, an assisted health enquiry service and a reporting channel for raising problems with a facility. The administrative side is a web platform covering enrolee management and verification, provider and facility management, appointments, health records, pharmacy and laboratory workflow, claims processing, billing, compliance reporting and analytics, all governed by role-based access control.

A companion Android client handles near-field card operations, because a scheme that issues cards needs those cards readable at the point of service rather than only in the head office. The platform runs on managed container infrastructure so capacity follows demand rather than being provisioned for a peak that occurs twice a year.

Enrolee mobile application and administrative web platform against one record
Enrolment, verification, appointments, health records, pharmacy and laboratory workflow
Claims processing, billing, compliance tracking and analytics for scheme administration
Citizen reporting channel so problems at a facility reach the authority directly
Companion Android client for near-field card operations at the point of service
Role-based access control across every administrative module

Reference Deployment: A National Health Insurance Platform

Questions Health Clients Ask

Two previous vendors failed here. Why would you be different?

Because we would probably start with your network, power and records department rather than with software, and we would tell you at proposal stage if the physical layer cannot support a clinical system. Most failed hospital deployments in Nigeria fail for infrastructure and process reasons, not application reasons. We also phase by department with a visible win first, so that clinical staff see benefit before they are asked to change everything.

What happens during a power or network failure?

Clinical nodes are battery-backed to ride through generator changeover, and BrilliantCare continues to operate against a local server if the wider network drops. Encounters captured during an outage are queued and reconciled automatically when connectivity returns. We also supply printed contingency forms and a documented downtime procedure, because no design removes the possibility entirely.

Can BrilliantCare talk to our laboratory and imaging equipment?

Where the equipment supports a standard interface, yes — we integrate over HL7 and DICOM for analysers, imaging modalities and third-party laboratory systems. Older equipment sometimes offers only a serial or file-based output; we have built adaptors for those too. We survey the estate before quoting so that the integration scope is known rather than assumed.

How do you protect patient confidentiality?

Access is role-based and scoped to the clinical relationship, every record view is logged with the identity of the viewer, and access outside a normal relationship requires a break-glass action with a mandatory written justification that is reported to the medical director weekly. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and we complete a data protection impact assessment under the Nigeria Data Protection Act before go-live.

Our records are entirely on paper. How long does migration take?

We do not attempt to digitise historical folders wholesale — it is expensive and the resulting data quality is poor. The usual approach is to register patients as they present, so the active population is captured within about four months, and to digitise historical folders only on demand or for defined cohorts such as chronic-care patients. Deduplication runs continuously through that period.

Will this reduce our staffing needs?

Honestly, no, and we would not sell it on that basis. Every facility we have worked with has redeployed records and billing staff rather than reduced headcount, because the underlying workforce shortage is clinical. What changes is where the hours go: less time locating folders and reworking rejected claims, more time on patient-facing and revenue-recovery work.

Talk to our health team

We will visit, measure your out-patient journey and claims rejection reasons, and give you a written baseline before proposing anything. Most facilities find the baseline alone worth having.

Talk to our health team See BrilliantCare