HELINA - Health Informatics in Africa - The Pan African Health Informatics Association and the African regional body of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

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Who We Are

The Health Informatics in Africa, (HELINA), is the Pan African Health Informatics Association and the African regional body of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA).

HELINA was founded in 1993, in Ile-Ife, Nigeria following a conference organised by Obafemi Awolowo University and University of Eastern Finland under the auspices of IMIA.

The primary purpose of HELINA is to promote education and research in health informatics in Africa and the implementation of ethical, modern and evidence based health informatics to enhance access to quality healthcare in Africa. HELINA subscribes fully to the IMIA vision that “there will be a world-wide systems approach for healthcare.

Through this, clinicians, researchers, patients and people in general will be supported by informatics tools, processes and behaviors that make it easy to do the right thing, in the right way, at the right time to improve healthcare for all. This systems approach will incorporate and integrate research, clinical care and public health.”

HELINA was originally registered under Malian Law but is currently registered under Ghanaian Law.

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Core Values

HELINA aligns itself closely to the vision and mission of IMIA, and shares the values and principles adopted by IMIA. HELINA adopts a pragmatic, “bottom-up” approach that is project-based and feeds up into global initiatives rather than being driven by global trends and initiatives.

Relevance: HELINA aims to remain practical and application-oriented while still addressing the need for health informatics research in Africa, taking into account cultural values as well as unique opportunities and challenges of implementing Health IT in Africa.
Accountability: holding HELINA and national societies accountable to each other on delivering and achieving their respective visions
Integrity: HELINA values professionalism and seeks to promote ethical conduct among members as outlined in IMIA Code of Ethics for Health Information Professionals
Transparency: promote transparency in collaborations between key stakeholders with the primary aim of building capacity, developing and implementing Health IT solutions and conducting research and evaluations that benefit the African continent

Our Vision

Transforming healthcare in Africa through health informatics research, development, implementation and education.

Our Mission

To guide and support national member associations so that they can become the collective voice of health informatics in Africa, providing a meaningful forum for health informatics research, development, implementation, education, standards development and technology adoption for the region.