T-Systems in South Africa delivers its SAP Healthcare solution to Busamed, which aims to be one of the country’s first black-owned hospital groups. Busamed, chaired by Dr. Diliza Mji, a pioneer in revolutionary healthcare, has been issued with four licenses to build hospitals in Gauteng, the Free State, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) and Cape Town.
These hospitals will provide best-in-class services and healthcare, supported by T-Systems’ IT solution which will provide a core information and communication technology (ICT) platform to enable Mji’s vision of bringing digitalised healthcare to hospitals in South Africa.
T-Systems’ healthcare solution based on SAP will provide Busamed with a central solution to manage all four hospital sites including the capabilities to share patient information and services through an Electronic Healthcare Record. This will deliver a number of benefits, including ease of group operations, standardised processes, and improved visibility into the daily running of each hospital.
Says Collin Govender, Vice President Systems Integration at T-Systems in South Africa: This healthcare approach reduces complexity and allows Busamed to focus on their core business while we take care of the ICT enabling platform. From the outset, Busamed will run on a trusted solution that has been proven to deliver sustainable and increased value to our private healthcare customers, knowing that T-Systems is committed to service through strategic partnerships and long term customer relationships.”
T-Systems’ solution for Busamed comprises SAP services as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application including financials, controlling, logistics and human resources management functionality and T-Systems’ special industry solution for healthcare (IS-H) which enables patient management and patient administration.
The contract also includes end-to-end services from implementation to go-live support and private hosting on T-Systems’ dynamic services platform, which centralises services and standardises SAP operations for improved efficiency and quality.
Busamed will also be implementing T-Systems’ i.s.h.med module, based on SAP technology platform, which combines clinical information with patient information, giving healthcare provider a comprehensive 360˚ view of a patient. This allows immediate access to critical information that will increase value to the patient and ultimately, improve the quality of healthcare services delivered by Busamed.
“Deutsche Telekom’s and its corporate customer arm, T-Systems, has a strategic focus on the healthcare segment. Medical progress, an ageing society and soaring costs are the biggest challenges faced by the healthcare sector.
“The system must become more efficient or it will become impossible to finance. At the doctor’s surgery, at hospital, in administration or at home, T-Systems provides innovation information and communication technology to open up new approaches to healthcare, nursing care, and administration. We develop solutions that help simplify processes, reduce costs, and improve quality”, says Govender.
The challenge for hospitals and doctors is to provide better services despite having to make cost savings. And patients are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their own health. T-Systems supports all stakeholders with modern ICT solutions: in areas such as telemedicine, telematics, care, hospitals and health insurance providers.
Healthcare is an important industry sector for T-Systems globally, with many successful implementations of healthcare specific solutions in countries across the world.
T-Systems in South Africa has demonstrated its ability in the healthcare sector with previous successful implementations in the private healthcare sector, and has a dedicated focus on modernisation and innovation, having participated in some capacity in at least 29 percent of all the private hospitals in South Africa today.
Through its relationship with current healthcare customers, T-Systems continues to improve and expand its offerings as an on-going commitment to the healthcare industry. Recent focus areas include healthcare specific analytics, tele-medicine and other mobile offerings that contribute to the healthcare value chain.
“Healthcare touches every South African. Outsourcing their core ICT infrastructure and services to T-Systems will enable Busamed to deliver on its vision of quality and profitable healthcare services. We believe that Busamed has the vision, appetite and dedication that sets them apart as a major contributor to quality healthcare.
“As our solution is a collection of preferred practice elements, the respective project elements can be executed in a rapid deployment method which reduces the implementation effort and therefore delivers a greater return on the initial investment,” says Govender.
Construction on the hospitals has begun and the first project for T-Systems is scheduled to begin eight months prior to the opening of the first hospital.