WATCH: New system to minimise time spent at South Rand Hospital
The hospital ask for patience and support during this exciting time of change.
South Rand Hospital went live with the new single integrated health information system (HIS) at 11:00 on November 2.
This is part of the drive by the Gauteng Department of Health to roll out such systems across all hospitals and community health centres in Gauteng. This is a system that will be replacing Medicom and patient administration and billing.
Speaking at the launch, the hospital’s acting CEO Dr Lucky Letwaba said he was always looking forward to this day.
“We want to provide excellent and integrated healthcare. Imagine coming to the hospital and not waiting for your file. Just punch in your details then all your details come up. We responded to the call of HIS where we will be venturing into a paperless system and I’m glad this is going to happen here at South Rand Hospital.
“We sent people for training and they are ready to serve the people. We had to procure the hardware to make this system smooth sailing,” he said.
Patrick Sello, head of the department of health’s ICT projects, said this system has been rolled out in about 20 hospitals including Chris Hani Baragwanath, George Mokhari and Charlotte Maxeke at an academic level and the tertiary level at Kalafong, Helen Joseph and Thembisa.
“With this system will be able to tell you if a patient went to another hospital before coming here. The patients will get an SMS reminding them of the appointment to the hospital 24 hours before the time and on the day of the appointment,” said Sello.
“We want to stop having discussions around the quantity of service rendered to our patients and rather focus on quality. Quality of service means if I arrive at the hospital at 07:00, then at 07:15 the doctor sees me and at 07:30 I’m at the pharmacy collecting my medication and at 08:00 I’m out. That’s quality, not quantity. Technology is supposed to help us achieve such service,” he said.
Ward 56 Clr Michael Crichton said he is excited to see the start of the programme as it will minimise time spent at the hospital. The chairperson of the board, Simpiwe Hlafa, welcomed the initiative and said it is a milestone for the community.
He acknowledged that it is not easy to migrate from an old system to HIS, saying people need to be patient.
The HIS seeks to do the following for the GDoH:
• Facilitate the attainment of integrated healthcare requirements.
• Provide GDoH with an Enterprise Health Information System Platform that integrates their core business requirements.
• Ensure adoption of common standards, processes and flexibility across the GDoH landscape.
What does the new HIS have to offer the patients across Gauteng Province, you may ask. These are some of the benefits that the HIS offers to patients:
• An integrated and improved patient experience of care due to the single view of the patient.
• Electronic files will reduce patient waiting times and prevent the loss or theft of files.
• The new SMS notification functionality will ensure that patients never forget their appointments, and this will help reduce defaults.
The HIS implementation follows a phased approach to minimise the impact on service delivery, with patient administration and patient finance and billing being in the first phase of the implementation and the Clinical Module being in the second phase.
HIS has gone live with patient administration and patient finance and billing at 18 hospitals and 31 CHCs.
This implementation will have an impact on patient waiting times as the end-users acclimatize to the new system, but this should improve by the third week of the implementation.
Patients are urged to bring their identification documents whenever they visit the hospital, this will ensure a smooth transition to the new system.
