DA questions health IT

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 13 Aug 2007

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is asking questions in Parliament about the shape of the national health department's IT systems.

This follows a comment in the Sunday Times this weekend that one reason for the sacking of deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was her alleged failure to produce a health IT policy.

"The minister [health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang] said, through her spokesman, Sibani Mngadi, that Madlala-Routledge was assigned to deal with health technologies, laboratories and government mortuaries, but showed slow progress in facilitating the transfer of the mortuaries' functions, which have been brought from under the jurisdiction of the South African Police Service to the health department," the Sunday Times reported.

"Tshabalala-Msimang also blamed her deputy for the poor state of laboratories, alleging she failed to facilitate the production of a health IT policy, which would have involved the procurement of equipment for government laboratories," the paper added.

The DA says the department indeed has a lot of "catch-up" to do, as its patient administration system is still not computerised and most clinics lack access to e-mail.

However, DA spokesman Mike Waters says this can probably not be laid at Madlala-Routledge's door.

"The claim that the deputy minister had not performed in relation to the implementation of the National Health Information System (NHIS) is hard to substantiate, given that the deputy minister's position is not mentioned at all in relation to this programme on the health department's Web site," Waters says.

"One can only presume that this is yet another effort to pin a tag of non-performance onto the deputy minister to justify what was clearly a politically-motivated sacking. It is indeed unfortunate that the one individual in the department who had shown signs of being able to shift the department away from its tragic Aids denialism has now been removed."

The NHIS was developed with a view to introducing technological innovations in various aspects of healthcare, including:

* A registration system for information on births, deaths and diseases.
* A telemedicine system for hospitals (involving the use of technology to give assistance to doctors and nurses in inaccessible areas).
* A system for recording regional variations in disease management and disease-occurrence.