Healthcare is a contentious issue in Africa for so many reasons. Not least is the inequality of the services provided by an underfunded public healthcare system, where most of the population receives care, versus private healthcare. Add to the mix a lack of records and availability of patient information, and one has a disaster in the making.
By Henry Adams, country manager of InterSystems South Africa
There is no doubt that paper-based record systems at healthcare facilities are a cause for concern for healthcare professionals. Antiquated systems can lead to medical errors by the health worker simply because the information at hand is not up to date or even clear.
The heart of the problem is reliable healthcare data. For example, a patient who has had a hip replacement will require blood thinners, but if the records given to a nurse on duty don’t reflect that, it can be overlooked. We don’t need to mention the consequences – but we know they could be dire.
Data: the foundation to better care
The solution is clear. We need to replace slow, siloed, opaque systems and move to streamlined ones that harmonise data and processes. But the practice is not always easy, and in South Africa, our public healthcare is facing a crisis of underfunding.
That said, the starting point is fixing broken systems within a provider’s clinical audit department. When you begin to track incidents, you will start identifying the root cause. So creating a log of incidents, like administering the wrong medication, provides insights into the root cause of the problem.
For many InterSystems customers, access to clean data has revealed that poorly managed operational systems lie at the heart of the problem. Carefully mapped data is a perfect way to enhance medication safety and ensure better overall performance ratings and outcomes. Moreover, it allows a clinic or hospital to do this at scale – without drowning in the paperwork, which is music to the ears of both public and private healthcare providers.
Collaboration: working together creates better systems
Systems provide no value without accurate information being fed to them by medical teams. A risk management information system can’t measure risk if it has no data to base findings on. Feedback systems are critical to ensure that everyone within the medical profession is invested in making a healthcare system work and understands the importance of their obligation to data integrity.
Collaboration ensures that people and teams are invested in making a project work, and it is also a unifying glue for technology and operations. You want your systems to speak to the challenges at hand and smooth processes – this only happens when you effectively transform feedback into efficiencies. Which then unlocks the true benefits of digital solutions.
Data is the key to better care
The rise of digital solutions is helping healthcare professionals deliver better services by leveraging technology to improve health outcomes and quality of care. And they ultimately lower the costs for patients. But without a reliable system, one decision can lead to countless mistakes.
South Africa saw the benefits of digital healthcare with the electronic vaccine certificate. It provided the government a bird’s eye view of where people live and where the demand was. They could then take the data and share it across organisations through a Health Information Exchange (HIE) to improve cooperation between the public and private sectors.
The benefits of HIEs are vast, as they enable clinicians to share information from different health record systems securely and efficiently with the patient’s approval. The HIE can collect clinical data from disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems and provide clinicians with an overall view of the patient’s medical history. As it stands in South Africa, a large portion of the private healthcare sector has implemented and is using an HIE, allowing the sharing of information to benefit the patient.
Lastly, clinical informatics, where these systems are deployed and the data collated, ensures enhanced safety and care of patients while protecting healthcare professionals and patients from unnecessary risk.
But effective digital healthcare is a journey. The next step for us to bridge the disparities in healthcare with the help of digital solutions is for public healthcare to join the HIE program in partnership with private healthcare. Only once this is done will we be able to bring and unlock real benefits to patients across the country.