The Western Cape Government has appointed Datacentrix, one of South Africa’s leading empowered services-led solution integrators, to help implement an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy within its Department of Health (DoH) facilities across the province.
The company has been awarded two tenders, the first to deploy an electronic patient record in ECM at the new Mitchells Plain Hospital. The second tender is a three-year ECM contract to roll this technology out to any hospitals and primary health care facilities identified by the WCG DoH, across the province.
Trish Dicks, national strategy manager: ECM public sector at Datacentrix, believes that, amid stiff competition, the organisation won the tenders due to its successful ECM implementation at Khayelitsha Hospital in 2012 and ongoing work at Tygerberg Hospital since 2009.
“One of the major reasons for dissatisfaction within public sector hospitals and community health centres is the lengthy waiting times,” states Dr Anwar Kharwa, CEO of Khayelitsha Hospital.
“Khayelitsha Hospital opened in January 2012 and, as a result of the Datacentrix ECM implementation, patient file retrieval times in admissions have been reduced to zero due to doctors now being able to access files electronically. In addition, the ECM project has helped cut waiting times because doctors now have information about patients at hand before seeing them.”
Dicks explains that the DoH’s ECM vision is to reduce physical documentation and paper-based files wherever possible within its processes, in order to improve management of patient files and information, and enhance service delivery.
In addition to a number of successful ECM implementations within the health sector, Datacentrix has rolled out ECM solutions at a number of other Western Cape Government departments.
These include the Department of Transport and Public Works, where solutions are as wide-ranging as correspondence tracking and bulk back scanning as well as BPM workflows, and the Department of the Premier, where a solution to manage cabinet submissions was put in place.
“Datacentrix is pleased to have been awarded these tenders and looks forward to continuing to work closely with the DoH, assisting the Department in improving the efficiency of its record-keeping and helping it to provide a world class, patient-centric service to all patients across the province,” she concludes.