Accessible health information is the cornerstone of delivering coordinated care across a complex healthcare system that involves local and
national institutions, along with hospitals, general practitioners, specialists, testing facilities, insurance companies, government organizations
and administrators. It has been demonstrated through research and implementations that combining health information locally and nationally
leads to the following benefits:
Improved patient outcomes by supporting effective care processes across the continuum of care;
Enhanced patient engagement and experience;
Reduced current costs and lower future costs for patients and stakeholders in the South African healthcare system;
Encourage and support the uptake of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) solutions;
To enable information exchange in South Africa, Colleaga, a Global Health System Innovation Collaborative and six large corporate entities
in private healthcare in South Africa, namely: Discovery Health, Life Healthcare, Medscheme, Mediclinic, MMI Health and Netcare,
have come together to establish a South African Health Information Exchange (HIE.ZA). The mission of the HIE.ZA is to securely
provide Health Information Sharing services that improve consumer health outcomes, quality, safety and efficiency, and drive down healthcare
system costs for all South Africans.The partners are committed to building an HIE for the private industry and then making it available to the
public health system, when the public system is able to implement it. We would like to expand the South African HIE to include local HIE
initiatives. However, while there are many open data initiatives, including OpenHIE and OpenMRS, they don’t have a common platform that
links them together to support local community collaboration.
Colleaga proposes to demonstrate how an innovation sharing and collaboration platform can accelerate and support public health information
exchanges in South Africa to enable the sharing of health data between local and national healthcare providers and payers.
In the first part of this project, Colleaga will build a consensus plan, technology architecture plan and implementation project plan for one South
African public HIE initiative. The tools developed and information collected to build these plans will be made available to other local HIE
initiatives. In the second part of this project, Colleaga will build upon the national South African implementation to develop the specification
for the Open Beneficiary / Patient Identification and Validation function which we will contribute to the Open HIE movement.
Since some of the main participants in this initiative are payors, the product will also focus on beneficiary / patient identification and
validation. This specification will complement the current work being done by the OpenHIE to develop an Open Health Insurance
specification.