Khayelitsha Hospital in Western Cape, South Africa, has deployed an OpenText Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution to improve patient-centric clinical services.
The ECM solution has helped the hospital to cut waiting times, minimise physical documentation and paper-based files, and improve management of patient files and information.
The system has also facilitated anywhere, anytime access to scanned content at consulting rooms, nurses’ stations, doctors’ offices, OPD and Allied Health facilities.
Khayelitsha Hospital CEO Dr Anwar Kharwa said one of the major reasons for dissatisfaction within public sector hospitals and community health centres are the lengthy waiting times.
"The hospital opened in January 2012 and patient file retrieval times in Admissions have been reduced to zero as a result of doctors now being able to access them electronically," Kharwa added.
Datacentrix ECM public sector national strategy manager Trish Dicks said the ECM project has created and delivered the capacity for Khayelitsha Hospital to convert its paper patient records into electronic format.
"It also uses an indexing model that allows medical staff to quickly and easily access patient records using a few key words such as patient name and hospital file number," Dicks added.
"By working closely with hospital commissioning staff, all standard forms have now been barcoded to assist in the automation of the labelling and indexing of content, which will considerably increase accuracy and efficiency, and automatically identify patient hospital record numbers and hospital document types."
