Question NW148 to the Minister of Health

Reply:

The Patient Information System implemented in OR Tambo Memorial Hospitals is owned and implemented by the Gauteng Department of Health. The Gauteng Provinces adopted the Modernisation Strategy aimed at improving the overall public services. “Gauteng health services will be modernized through effective management of information systems and the development and implementation of e-health strategies towards creating a paperless environment. The implementation of the new Patient Information Systems was to replace the two legacy systems used in the Gauteng facilities, being Medicom 2X and PAAB, the two systems were implemented in early 2000 and were no longer supported by their Original Software Manufacture (OSM).

The implementation of the system was expected to create queues only in the first two weeks of transitioning from the old system to the new system. This was due to data being migrated (data clean-up, data verification, data crossmatch, and data validation) from the old systems to the newly implemented system. To mitigate this expected issue, a change and adoption team was made available to the hospital to interact with patients while waiting in the queues and provided details on the new system and its benefits. The above intervention allowed the hospital to stabilise the system and transition from the old to the new system.

The hospital has a complaint and complement system in place which are monitored regularly. Based on the records for this system such complaints as per the question has not been recorded. The hospital also monitor patient waiting time for retrieval of files and this waiting time is within the benchmark waiting time of 30 minutes

Elderly patients have their own queues and should they come for a follow-up visit with a booking at the hospital, the files are retrieved the day before the booking. This significantly decrease waiting time for the retrieval of files at the administration.

END.