Business Connexion, recently formed through a merger between Comparex Africa and Business Connexion, yesterday showcased the systems and services it has delivered to the KwaZulu-Natal Health Department in a subcontracting arrangement with the Impilo Consortium.
The Impilo deal ranges over 15 years - two of which have been completed - and entails the establishment of the recordless hospital. Compensation to the various Impilo members (including AME - to which Business Connexion is contracted) is in the form of "unitary" monthly payments, but principals say the deal is worth R6.2 billion over the period.
At admission, patients are "queued" electronically, eliminating overbooking and minimising waiting time. No physical patient files are opened, other than as a repository for legally required documents, such as signed prescriptions. The entire registration process is electronic and, say staff, much quicker, as are patient records, notes (illegibility is eliminated too), referrals, doctors` lab orders, test results and scans.
The wards ITWeb visited were equipped with laptops, securely fastened to trolleys, label printers and desktop PCs at central areas. Almost nowhere was paper in evidence. Some wards have digital cameras, and all PC client devices are wirelessly networked.
A range of medical digital imaging and other equipment is integrated into the system, for information sharing between physicians - even remotely. A Web-based remote viewing tool allows participatory clinical involvement from a distance, in ICU and other high-care units.
In their own words
Bryn Woombel, GM of AME, a consortium member along with Siemens and other entities, says AME was contracted to supply medical equipment and electronic facilities - including ICT equipment and facilities management - all non-core to Impilo.
"The output portion of the contract stated that we had to deliver a state of the art facility - after 15 years. Obviously this means tech refreshes - desktops are replaced after three years, notebooks after five and servers after seven years. There is a penalty regime - we meet once a month and draw an OLAP report on the deliverables, which are performance, availability and quality."
The computer room at the hospital consists of True-64 Alpha server clusters, Wintel servers and a Cisco networking backbone. The Alpha servers host the medical (Medicom) and enterprise resource planning systems, the Wintel ones the mailing, file and print systems, and all systems are dual-redundant. The storage area network requirement runs into 2.4TB.
AME has 45 people on premises, and Business Connexion 10, including SAP support.
Share