Customer

Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital/ AME Africa

Case Study

The Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital (IALCH) is an 846-bed referral hospital located in Durban, South Africa. It comprises outpatient, in-patient, daycare, high care, intensive care and trauma facilities, and is the main tertiary care hospital for the province.

AME Africa and the IMPILO Consortium where awarded a tender in 2007 to develop and implement a state of the art paperless Hospital Information System amongst other things and have to date implemented technology to make the hospital the most technologically advanced in the country and have brought it on par with the best hospitals in the world.

AME Africa have subsequently partnered with Xcallibre to integrate digital pen and paper technology into key areas in the hospital where other technologies have shortcomings.

The first such digital pen project was to assist AME and IALCH in compiling an authorized paper record of all active users, system privileges and security access cards. This was firstly required for audit purposes and secondly to conduct a system and database cleanup and compile an accurate updated record of each active user at the hospital.

This was a process whereby they needed to capture records of each user that required physical access to areas in the hospital as well as its various computer systems.

The project was initiated by AME Africa, the IT systems provider contracted to the hospital, which required that their team visit each department within the hospital and interview each user. These users included AME staff, hospital staff, contractors, etc. They would complete an access audit form with an Xcallibre digital pen for each user which stated what systems and physical access the user required. They would then take the same form to HR, line managers and security to confirm if the required access was authorized.

Once this information was captured and checked/approved, this information would then be loaded into the security access systems to generate new identity access cards used to allow physical access to secure areas within the hospital. This info was also imported into the IT security model which controlled user access to the various IT systems within the hospital.

The digital pen technology was an ideal tool to complete this exercise as for audit purposes signatures where required and the technology allowed for the easy and speedy capture of data using its advanced handwriting recognition

The purpose of the project was also to identify the ease of use of the digital pens and training requirements. Another purpose was to expose hospital users and AME staff to the technology and get feedback on user acceptance.

Due to the pen also being used across all areas in the hospital, its field ruggedness in a hospital environment would also be gauged.
Lastly a key area of testing was to ensure easy integration with existing systems to transfer data once collected.

Once this project is complete and following its success which has been proven already, the technology is envisaged to be implemented in other areas in the hospital such as doctors notes, patient files, consent forms, billing, HR, leave forms, scripts, ER notes, ambulance and emergency services patient forms and outpatient visits to name but a few.