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The City of Joburg celebrated the historical milestone of Nomhle Ntsizana becoming the 500 000th patient to use the City’s innovative and cutting-edge Electronic Health Record (EHR) system on 28 August 2018.
In the greater context of the City’s strategy to create a culture of enhanced service delivery and encourage innovation and efficiency, this milestone shows that the City of Johannesburg is leading the way in being a customer centric organisation.
The EHR system is a cloud-based application that is currently found in 64 of the City’s clinics. It is a biometric system that stores patient information online and help the City to cut tedious paper-based admiration of patient’s information.
Patients now have one unique centralised record. Before the introduction of the system, the potential to lose or duplicate patient information was high. The EHR system not only results in centralisation, it also allows for integration between private and public health hospitals or clinics.
With the EHR system, even if a patient moves to another province or moves between private and public health facilities, their medical information can still be tracked.
The EHR systems is also linked to the National Health Laboratory Service and public pharmacies. Doctors are now a click away from accessing patients test results. The system is also reducing dispensary errors and stopping the phenomenon of patients “shopping around” for medication. The EHR system shows when a patient has received their medication.
The City’s newly appointed Chief Technology Officer, Cyril Baloyi, poignantly encapsulated the importance of the EHR system. “The new system is part of the City’s broader smart city strategy that is creating a client-centric City and it is also reducing human intervention that can lead to fraud and corruption.”
As part of the City’s aim to being more customer centric, it has also installed public access Wi-Fi in its clinics. Patients can now access the internet while their wait to be served at clinics. The City has also introduced electronic queue management system that is helping to better manage queues at the City’s clinics and ultimately improve on service delivery.
