Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery Pipeline Design for Nigerian Health Information Systems

Health information systems in Nigeria require reliable, secure, and rapid software update mechanisms to respond to evolving clinical protocols, regulatory changes, and security vulnerabilities. This study examines the design and implementation of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for health information systems in Nigeria, with technical assessments drawn from hospital management systems deployed in Kaduna (North West) and Abia (South East) State hospitals. The research employs a design science methodology, developing a CI/CD pipeline architecture tailored to the constraints of Nigerian health IT environments, including intermittent internet connectivity and limited DevOps engineering capacity. The proposed pipeline integrates GitHub Actions for CI, Ansible for configuration management, and Docker for containerised deployment. A comparative evaluation between manual deployment and CI/CD-assisted deployment across three system releases measures deployment time, error rate, and rollback capability. Results show that CI/CD-managed deployments reduce deployment time by 73 percent and eliminate environment configuration errors entirely. The study addresses the challenge of pipeline maintenance in small health IT teams by proposing a simplified pipeline template requiring minimal DevOps expertise. Professional recommendations include training grants for health IT engineers and adoption of the proposed pipeline template by the National Health Management Information System (NHMIS) programme. Keywords: CI/CD, health information systems, DevOps, Nigeria, deployment automation