Airborne brings benefit of technology to Hospice Palliative Care Association

One year after the rollout of the Hospice Palliative Care Association's (HPCA) new data management system, Hospice members throughout South Africa are seeing the massive benefits that technology can bring to their daily operations - where technology has not traditionally played a major role.

The Hospice Data Management System (HDMS) was co-funded and built by award-winning Microsoft partner, Airborne Consulting, to provide a uniquely African solution to an African problem.

Says Airborne CEO Sean O'Connell: “The 202 service delivery sites that operate under the umbrella of the HPCA are responsible for recording details of the care they provide to patients and family members across the country. This data needs to be collated into monthly demographic statistics and reported to HPCA, who in turn need to aggregate the statistics regionally and nationally.”

The organisation was faced with a number of challenges.

* Because these massive volumes of data were mostly paper-based, monthly reporting was manually intensive, frequently delayed, and prone to error and inconsistency, with different processes followed at each independent hospice.
* Problems were further compounded by geographically distributed and often remote sites with limited IT infrastructure and Internet connectivity.

Says HPCA CEO, Dr Liz Gwyther: “To ensure that international funders have confidence in these statistical demographic details, it was vital that HPCA establish a more effective and consistent process of gathering data from our member hospices. And because each member hospice is an independently run NGO to whom the HPCA does not dictate, the solution would only be viable if it received buy-in from all members.”

Hospice HDMS consists of two distinct, physically separate components. A smart client application is installed on the client machine and a consolidated data store is hosted on a central server.

This approach was followed due to the connectivity constraints of the environment, in order that the application could function and perform day-to-day tasks without the need for connectivity to the central server. To accomplish this, the smart client (developed using Windows Presentation Foundation) leverages a locally installed instance of SQL2008 Express.

In order to optimise interpretation of the data, HPCA required a mechanism that would analyse data without dependence on technical resources and the associated delays. Airborne accordingly developed a dimensional data-warehouse to simplify the operational data model and to improve bulk reporting performance.

Says Dr Gywther: “As a result of the work we do, HPCA is intimately involved with underprivileged communities in South Africa, and Airborne's solution is adding significantly to our capacity to engage these communities. The streamlined processes that have resulted from the HDMS implementation have resulted in more time being available for Hospice volunteers and caregivers to engage with the community and to focus their attentions on the care-giving process as opposed to data collection and capture.”

Says O'Connell: “The challenges facing the South African government in respect of TB and Aids treatment alone are well documented. HPCA and the HDMS solution are making great strides in identifying and tracking individual interventions that will ultimately contribute to a more accurate assessment of the extent of the challenge, and support decisions taken at a government level.”

He continues: “The solution architecture lends itself to seeking other efficiencies that may be brought to the distributed affiliated network, and Airborne is actively exploring solutions that might deliver additional business benefit while reducing operating costs - such as information sharing, making training material easily available, collaboration in respect of care support etc.”