Johannesburg, 23 Sep 2011
Leading integrator of innovative business solutions, Business Connexion is ideally positioned to help government agencies operate in a fully connected environment, particularly in the two critical market verticals of healthcare and education.
“Business Connexion has an excellent track record in the public sector, where we have worked closely with many government departments to enable and improve service delivery,” says Stanley Rabasotho, Business Connexion's Account Executive: Innovation - Provincial and Local Government.
“For example, we set up a Microsoft automated workflow solution for leave, which reduced a department's risk of fraud. E-Venus, our ERP solution for local government, is used to produce more than 4.5 million statements for South African ratepayers.”
In the healthcare environment, Business Connexion focuses on the development and adoption of interoperable networks to improve citizen health, as well as the affordability and overall quality of healthcare.
“Healthcare consumes an ever-growing portion of South Africa's gross domestic product, and this trend will accelerate as the population ages and lives longer,” Rabasotho says.
“Technology can help deliver effective healthcare to more people and places, more quickly, and at lower cost. Everyone benefits - those in remote and under-served areas, where there are few or no health services today; and those served by fragmented delivery systems, which create complex co-ordination tasks and consume valuable time and resources.”
The prime drivers in healthcare are similar to those in other market sectors: improving customer service and reducing costs. According to Rabasotho, those healthcare providers that can find a way to contain medical costs, and provide a higher level of service, will have a huge advantage.
“Business Connexion intends to supply that advantage to its customers by consolidating healthcare voice, video and data on a single network,” he says.
This approach results in: improved patient outcomes; better access to care for all patients; access to patient data in hospitals, clinics and remote sites; more efficient clinical workflow and processes; preventative care solutions to manage infectious and chronic disease; and education and training for clinicians and health workers.
On the education front, Business Connexion tackles the challenges of traditional education methods by facilitating distance and remote teaching.
Themba Gumbi, Group Executive: Business Development - Public Sector, emphasises: “The challenges facing government education include a lack of qualified teachers in undeveloped areas, an unacceptable teacher-to-student ratio, and a lack of two-way interaction and information exchange between students. In addition, many rural areas have poor facilities and network infrastructures, as well as little or no computer or digital resources.”
By deploying distance education methods, teaching and learning can be performed anywhere, anytime. This enables students to learn through self-study, while still benefiting from two-way communication and feedback.
Gumbi adds that distance education can be used to complement traditional education. “This approach enables excellent teaching resources to be shared, and it means an unlimited number of people can be involved,” he points out.
The Business Connexion solution consists of communication, database, system software, network and hardware platforms. Functionality encompasses file, desktop and whiteboard sharing, as well as video broadcasting, interactive browsing and real-time courseware development. Additional facilities such as courseware on demand, online training and online testing are also available.
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