Despite significant digital transformation progress, South Africa’s healthcare sector still grapples with siloed, legacy paper-based document and medical record management systems.
GenAI, effectively used, could help solve this problem.
This is according to professionals at InterSystems South Africa, the local branch of the Boston-headquartered data management solution provider.
Speaking at the InterSystems South Africa Summit 2024 in Sandton, John Paladino, VP of client services, said 30% of the company’s business comes from international markets, with the Middle East and Africa considered strategic growth areas.
Paladino said that a major part of the company’s AI strategy involves running analytics and AI/ML processes close to the data. “We are flexible, and we’ve developed a single engine for both row and columnar query processing. We’ve made analytical queries ten times faster,” he added.
Jeff Fried, director of platform strategy at InterSystems South Africa, noted healthcare was the top adopter of GenAI globally in 2023 and remains among the leading sectors today.
“A survey I saw last week ranked healthcare second, just behind financial services. The pressure of documentation in healthcare is overwhelming. In the US, half of the doctors want to retire because of it,” he added.
The end of ’Pajama time’ workload
Fried described the phenomenon of ‘pajama time,’ where healthcare professionals often catch up on paperwork and administrative tasks long after their families have gone to bed.
What GenAI offers, primarily, is support for record keeping and clinical notes, said Fried. There are around thirty solutions on the market for ambient listening technology that transcribes conversations between doctors and patients, providing useful documentation for clinicians, he added.
Machine learning is also being used in healthcare to triage incoming messages and suggest responses, prioritising medical cases based on severity.
“Doctors love it because they can focus on the facts and not on the syntax,” said Fried. “Patients love it because they feel it’s a much friendlier environment and they find the machine-generated correspondence more accessible, including its ability to translate languages.”
The challenge of managing reams of documentation and patient records exists in both the private and public healthcare sectors, said Fried. Privacy and security are long-standing issues, but they’ve become even more pronounced now with the rise of cloud-based GenAI services. When using these systems, there’s the concern of transmitting private information.
Healthcare information is hard to truly identify and there’s only a few techniques for identifying bulk healthcare data (allowing
data anonymisation)
without losing analytical power. So, I see a difference in the speed of adoption based upon the maturity of an organisation’s data privacy and security practice,
and there are differences between the private and public sectors in this regard,” Fried added.
Established in 1979, with over 39 offices globally, InterSystems has over one billion patient records in its database.
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