TriFour Health MD Johann Odendaal will provide an in-depth look at community healthcare portals, and the potential impact the concept could have in the South African healthcare arena, at a Johannesburg health conference during November.
The Transforming Health Through ICTs conference, being held at the Indaba Hotel on 10 and 11 November, will focus on how the healthcare sector can create greater public awareness through improved health information systems.
TriFour focuses on developing, installing and maintaining health information systems in Africa, and is a partner of InterSystems, developer of the CACH'E post-relational database which is used by a large number of healthcare organisations around the world.
With more and more care delivery organisations (CDOs) looking to clinical automation as a means to achieve improved patient safety and efficiency, Odendaal will examine some basic approaches available for accomplishing these goals, including enterprise clinical portals (ECPs) and computer based patient record (CPR) systems.
"In the private sector, this will enable hospitals to monitor, by episode, how effectively they treat patients throughout the continuum of care - recording and analysing visits to the emergency rooms, GP and specialist consultations and diagnosis, treatment in the hospital, and home care," says Odendaal. "This will allow for the measurement of treatment outcomes and the adherence to best practices as defined by hospitals. Hospitals will be able to rely on practical and proven data and accurate outcome analysis. Patients could then be assessed on arrival, their level of care measured, their readmission information scanned and any infections recorded."
In public facilities, notes Odendaal, community healthcare portals can connect primary healthcare and community clinics and make up-to-date health records instantly available. By using modern technology like 3G and GPRS - that connects to operational systems in the hospitals and central patient records - health delivery can be improved and made measurable.
Odendaal will investigate how ICT can be an effective method of improving service delivery in the healthcare sector, how it can lessen the burden on over-extended healthcare workers, and how more attention needs to be given to the development of national guidelines regarding ICT in healthcare.
"Health portals are here, how we apply them and interface with patients are the key questions that will determine their success and usefulness," he says.
For more information, or to attend the conference, please call 0861 30 40 60, (011) 803 0009, info@tci-sa.co.za, or visit www.tci-sa.co.za.
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Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems Corporation (www.InterSystems.com) has served the needs of IT organisations and independent software vendors for more than two decades. InterSystems` innovative products, the CACH'E post-relational database and the Ensemble universal integration platform, enable the rapid creation and fast integration of high-performance applications.
Over four million people use mission-critical applications based on InterSystems` software. Twenty-five regional offices serve application developers and integrators around the world, and 24 x 7 support is provided for all InterSystems products.
A free, fully functional, no time-limit copy of CACH'E can be downloaded or requested on CD from the InterSystems Web site.
InterSystems is the leading database provider in healthcare, with CACH'E in use at the majority of major hospitals and labs around the world, including America`s 10 best hospitals as rated by US News and World Report.
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