E-health tender 'on track'

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 14 Aug 2007

A tender for the Department of Health's national electronic health record system, some 10 years in the making, is on track and a winner will be announced in due course, says a senior official.

Dr Shamin Khotu, the department's national health information system (NHIS) director, says: "Everything is on track. We've done our technical work."

The NHIS is intended to provide the country an overall patient information system, linking the private and public sector at local, district, provincial and national level. The public sector alone includes 369 general and 54 specialised hospitals, as well as 3 143 clinics and a number of support institutions such as medical laboratories.

The project was conceived about a decade ago, following what was billed as a "major review" of the then-existing systems for handling health information.

The review recommended that priority be given to information systems related to disease surveillance and facility management.

Health department tender documents say this includes "the choice of a National Healthcare Management Information System (NHCMIS) to be developed, installed and initiated in all the major public hospitals, and an appropriately scaled-down version of the same NHCMIS in all the smaller hospitals and primary healthcare centres".

Modules selected for fast-tracking include those for patient registration, a core patient record data set, appointment scheduling and patient billing.

Khotu says the tender award has been long in coming, but the department wanted "to make sure it's clean and correct".

"I put my life on this tender. Other than apologising to the minister for it being so slow, everything is on track and there are no bottlenecks."

The NHIS was dragged into the news at the weekend, when a health ministry spokesman suggested deputy health minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge was sacked in part for her alleged failure to produce a health IT policy.