Medicom bags $2-million contract from South African hospital

Our Corporate Bureau
04 January 2003

The hospital was officially inaugurated on 22 November 2002 by Deputy President of South Africa Jacob Zuma. The 800-beds IALCH is under the patronage of department of health, KwaZulu Natal government, and provides for both National Central Services and Tertiary Care Services.

A paperless and filmless hospital implementation involves documenting and managing all types of information, like character data, graphs, X-ray images, MRI or CT scan images through the use of electronic media and computers.

Information pertaining to a patient, be it administrative or clinical, is captured directly on the computer system at the point of origin of the data. The information is then available across the entire hospital on computers over a network facility. Any authorised user can access the patient information from anywhere in the hospital.

To create a paperless and filmless environment, the Medicom Hospital Information System is connected to various medical equipment like laboratory analysers, radiology equipment and critical care units at IALCH. This enables results and outputs from these equipment to be automatically captured into the electronic medical record. It avoids the entry of data, thereby reducing the scope of data errors, and also enables the technicians to focus on abnormal results and critical patients.

Patient information is continuously and accurately stored in a longitudinal health record in the form of text, images, documents etc, ensuring better quality of care through the completeness and timeliness of available data. The automated Hospital Information System provides for data discipline and thereby enhances adherence to best industry practices and enhanced quality of patient care.

The benefit to a hospital that adopts a paperless and filmless environment is that a multimedia-based health record is maintained and the speed of patient information availability is enhanced; the medical record is available to users as soon as it is created.