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Data, information the lifeblood of positive healthcare outcomes

01 November 2023 Gareth Stokes

The seamless exchange of data and information between hospitals, patients, medical schemes and other providers is non-negotiable for improved treatment outcomes across the South African healthcare sector. Announced in August 2021, and launched around April of the following year, the CareConnect Health Information Exchange (HIE) is striving to meet this information need in collaboration with three of the country’s largest hospital groups and three medical schemes administrators.

Building a healthcare information ‘utility’

The inaugural CareConnect HIE Summit, held in Johannesburg recently, was attended by representatives from Life Healthcare; Mediclinic; Netcare; Discovery Health, Medscheme, and Momentum alongside various private and public sector stakeholders in the domestic healthcare sector. 

Their collective mission: to learn more about the progress being made towards making healthcare information more readily available, countrywide. “Data and information are the lifeblood of what we are trying to achieve, and interoperability is at the heart of our solution,” said Dr Rolan Christian, CEO at CareConnect HIE, during his opening remarks to the summit. He added that HIE was “a conduit through which information flowed, linking together patients, providers, hospitals and other stakeholders in the ecosystem”. 

The CareConnect public relations machinery describes its purpose as “to develop an interoperable health system that will dismantle the silos and fragmentation historically hampering the health sector, in the interest of improved quality and efficiency of care”. And according to Dr Christian, the overarching goal of the project is to advance healthcare information sharing to ensure better outcomes for patients and the industry. He envisions HIE as a utility type solution that would be available to all stakeholders in the healthcare sector, subject to data privacy regulations of course. Great progress has been made over the last 12-18 months, with over 5.2 million consented lives added to the HIE, and around 90 000 information requests being fulfilled per month. 

Getting to grips with SA’s demographic

The highlight of the full-day conference was an hour-long panel discussion that focused on participants’ views on data and information in healthcare, and the progress made since the HIE launch. The discussion was moderated by Dr Boshoff Steenekamp, a Health Strategist at Momentum Health Solutions and an Alternate Director of HIE, who introduced spokespersons from some of the HIE founding members and local healthcare professional bodies. 

Dr Astrid Ellaya, who represented Mediclinic, said that stakeholders needed a clear understanding of the current environment to design and implement user-appropriate healthcare information solutions. As such, SA must plan its healthcare and health services solutions to meet the needs of a growing, young population, and ensure that these solutions evolve in line with the country’s demographics. The main thrust of the discussion was that younger people were more tech savvy, and thus more likely to demand instant access to their medical information. Dr Ellaya noted that 82% of the hospital group’s new patients “were already sharing or prepared to share their information with the HIE”. 

After offering up a range of research-backed evidence that supported improved outcomes through the adoption of HIE-type systems, the doctor advocated for a sensible, trial-and-error approach to future developments. “As we collaborate, there will be use cases that do not work, and we need to accept that they will not work,” she said. “And [we must realise that] there are stakeholders that will never adopt the system and never utilise it; we need to learn from these lessons and fine-tune as we go along”. 

Patients must tell their stories…

Participating as a representative of the South African Private Practitioners Forum (SAPPF), Dr Simon Strachan noted that he dealt with patients’ information on a daily basis. He reminded the conference that HIE or not, patients would still have to “tell their stories” when interacting with doctors and specialists. “As physicians we need to ask questions and hear [the patient’s response] to the way that we have posed these questions, because this allows us time to think,” he said. The SAPPF is made up of 16 different specialist disciplines that are keen to contribute to the HIE process. 

Dr Strachan suggested that a central repository of healthcare data could streamline doctor-patient interactions, before adding that long-term benefits could also accrue from mining the resultant healthcare data to identify trends as relates to treatment outcomes. He said that the question that should be posed in the CareConnect HIE context was: Does this solution enhance the patients’ and the healthcare providers’ individual and united participation for better healthcare outcomes? The doctor reminded the audience that interoperability was a key component of a sustainable HIE, also drawing attention to the fact that only one-in-four healthcare professionals were using electronic health record systems presently. 

Discovery Health’s incoming CEO, Dr Ron Whelan, shared some of the medical scheme administrator’s perspectives around data and the HIE. According to Dr Whelan, data sharing is about “giving the patient or the physician the right data, at the right time, to deliver optimal health outcomes and improve longevity”. Current data use cases being perfected at the business include promoting healthy lifestyles; management of chronic disease; and the provider-centric Health ID platform. “What we seek to do across Health ID [is to] share data with our partners across the ecosystem; to provide population health management dashboards; to provide clinical information; and to provide practice efficiency information,” Dr Whelan said. 

Precise and personalised health pathways

Turning to the recently launched ‘personal health pathways’ concept, the doctor noted that by combining the scheme’s lifestyle data with healthcare data from the hospital system and other third-party data available in the ecosystem, and then applying machine learning to this data, the business could develop “precise and personalised health pathways for every individual” in a data set. This pathway allows the medical scheme and / or other healthcare providers to draw up a set of actions designed to optimise an individual’s health and longevity outcomes. “If we get together around the HIE, and we leverage dependability across the country, we can personalise defensive medicine across the ecosystem,” Dr Whelan concluded. 

Lesley Moodley, MD at Altron HealthTech, said that CareConnect encouraged collaboration between stakeholders in the healthcare sector. He introduced two themes for collaboration towards the anticipated HIE outcomes. The first is for the founding partners in the HIE to realise they were catalysts for the process of combining and leveraging the information held by healthcare providers and medical schemes. Second, is to view the patient as an individual, and to explore how technology could be used to complete the patient’s life ‘picture’. As for the challenge around interoperability, Moodley concluded: “We need to look at interoperability from an inclusivity point of view and begin finding ways to bring more participants in”. 

Seamless, safe and comprehensive care

As a parting shot, this writer includes more of the marketing content courtesy CareConnect. They envision the HIE as “a beacon guiding South Africa’s healthcare evolution … where every individual’s journey, their demographics, medical history and unique health story is safe-guarded on a single unified care record, a care record that grows as their health journey unfolds”. Who dares argue against the vision of no more gaps, no more uncertainty, just seamless, safe and comprehensive care

Writer’s thoughts:

A discussions on healthcare data is probably outside the remit of local healthcare brokers; but you may occasionally be called upon to address your clients’ data privacy concerns. Do you think your clients, when requested to do so, should share their healthcare information via platforms like the CareConnect HIE? Please comment below, interact with us on Twitter at @fanews_online or email us your thoughts editor@fanews.co.za.

 

 

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