Page 26 - EngineerIT October 2022

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Lack of digital transformation in

health care points to a disaster

ybrid IT systems integrator and managed services provider Datacentrix recently
held its inaugural Healthcare Indaba at Zebula Golf Estate in Limpopo Province,
Hhosting an event that brought together South Africa’s technology leaders with
healthcare industry players to discuss critical trends and insights within the sector.
In his welcome address, Datacentrix CEO Ahmed Mahomed stated that while the
local healthcare industry has seen significant progress in digital transformation, it has
not been fast enough, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only underscored the fact that
the process needs greater acceleration.
“The slower rate of technology adoption in healthcare can be attributed to several
factors,” he said. “The lack of standardisation across technologies, poor systems
integration, highly customised systems and processes, physical on-site limitations, as
well as hospital admission and administrative processes that are still largely manual are
some that were mentioned.
Specialists tend to operate within a vacuum, without a common data set across the
data systems and no single view of a patient’s data, meaning that the historical context
of the patient is often lost, and specialists don’t necessarily have access to all the data Ahmed Mahomed
that is available for a patient. There is a need to have a single view of all information
related to a patient to all service providers. Mahomed’s advice was for
healthcare organisations to start the
Bridging the technology/ business disconnect in healthcare digital transformation journey with
Another serious challenge is the significant gap between technology and business, network infrastructure, to leverage the
and digitisation can help to align technology investment with the delivery of business intelligence that can be gained in terms
objectives. The key lies in being able to access and understand data in real-time; it is of the customer experience. “Collecting,
here that digital transformation delivers its best value. mining and applying this intelligence

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