A hospital in South Africa is rolling out a
web-basedhealthcare systemalready in use in
the UK and 24 other countries to improve the quality of care in
itsHIV/AIDS treatment centreto an
increasing number of patients.
The TrakCare system, which is already used at more than 30 sites
in the UK, has enabled the Sinikithemba Centre at McCord Hospital
in Durban to store all patient data in a single repository to
enable staff to track and manage anti-retroviral treatment plans
for the average of 150 patients it cares for each day.
"The system alerts us when patients miss treatments, which
enables us to follow up immediately to improve care and ensure
vital adherence to medication," said Helga Holst, medical
superintendent of McCord Hospital.
The system is being used to record the clinical condition of
patients and any side effects from their treatment. This enables
the centre to monitor progress, make easy comparisons between
patients and generate analysis reports using the database, which is
being shared with regional and international HIV/AIDS researchers
as well as medical students at Harvard University in the US.
McCord Hospital plans to adopt a similar implementation model to
the one in use in the UK by rolling out the TrakCare system from
TrakHealth in the next year to manage administrative and clinical
activities in all departments.
Bill Mackie, regional director for TrakHealth in the UK, said,
"The Priory Healthcare Group is running the system in its 27
hospital throughout the UK on a central system to provide access to
a comprehensive electronic patient record."
In the past year, authorities in channel island Guernsey have
signed a contract with TrakHealth to create an integrated care
record system that covers social care, community care, ambulatory
and acute care, and that can be accessed from anywhere via the
internet.
McCord Hospital chose TrakCare because it provided a
customisable HIV treatment module as well as the storage capacity
and analysis functionality the Sinikithemba centre needed.
TrakCare can now be integrated with the rest of the hospital
because it is built on top of the Ensemble platform from
Intersystems, which owns the TrakHealth subsidiary.
"The Ensemble base gives the system flexibility and enables
medical institutions to customise it to their needs and use one or
more of its modules without replacing existing systems," said
Mackie.
He said Scotland's Lothian Health Board was able to deploy
TrakCare without replacing its recently upgraded clinical
laboratory system as a result of the built in integration
technology from Intersystems.