Engineering News

Busamed is a fully black-owned South African hospital group. With the recent opening of its Modderfontein facility, Busamed continues to deliver on its commitment to patient care through digital transformation: applying cutting-edge technology, combined with an unparalleled dedication to quality of patient care.
 
Busamed’s journey kicked-off with the commissioning of four hospitals, comprising almost 600 hospital beds, in the provinces of Gauteng, the Western Cape and the Free State.
 
Its first hospital, the Busamed Paardevlei Private Hospital, houses a world-class cardiology centre of excellence. Its second facility, Busamed Modderfontein Private Hospital Orthopaedic & Oncology Centre, launched earlier this month. The third and fourth will officially open their doors over the coming months; further new facilities may be opened over time.
 
Busamed’s network of hospitals is expected serve the communities in which it operates in many ways: from the healthcare services delivered to patients, to the creation of at least 1200 new jobs (within the first 4 facilities) and by stimulating positive competition in the healthcare sector.
 
Challenges
Building hospitals is a highly capital-intensive endeavour, with massive infrastructure costs and expensive medical equipment. Inevitably, these high upfront costs take time to deliver results – as bed occupancy rates begin fairly low, and only start ramping up after some time.
 
Busamed was looking for a world-class, strategic IT partner that would not only assist with design input to these technologically-advanced healthcare facilities, but would also minimise the capex required for IT investments, by understanding and incorporating a hospital’s commercial reality into the services model.
 
By adopting a longer-term, opex-based model, T-Systems enabled Busamed to access the best IT services, specialised for the healthcare sector, with minimal upfront costs. This eases the business case for Busamed freeing up working capital and enables them to channel financial resources into other areas.
 
The solution
As Busamed started making its initial preparations in 2012, it brought T-Systems on board to deliver IT solutions for its planned hospitals. A comprehensive Hospital Information Systems (HIS) was implemented – covering every aspect of financials, logistics, clinical information systems, human capital management and more.
 
“We were essentially set up to run all of our healthcare facilities, end-to-end, from a powerful, fully-integrated solution,” explains Busamed IT Manager Servesan Moodley.
 
Against the backdrop of rapid advances in Cloud computing over recent years, in 2016 this was migrated to the T-Systems Dynamic Computing hosted environment, creating a ‘Healthcare-as-a-service’ solution – including hosting, support, project services, software, and maintenance.
 
“Healthcare-as-a-service incorporates the end-to-end healthcare value chain,” explains T-Systems Sales Manager Johann Joubert, including the three critical domains of a hospital – the patient, the enterprise and the employee.
 
The T-Systems SAP Healthcare solution enables Busamed to smoothly handle all patient administration, the planning and scheduling of procedures, people and equipment, all of the electronic data exchanges with medical aid providers, and patient billing – simplifying the complexities of co-payments and down-payments and case management.
 
The clinical information management offering, which relates to the actual care of the patient, is used to maintain and manage a comprehensive set of patient medical data in a readily available, digital and fully auditable manner
 
“Information across the entire healthcare value chain is available in a governed, integrated and real-time fashion, allowing hospital management or care specialists to known exactly what is happening with a particular patient, at any moment,” adds Joubert. “Executives have great visibility over the performance of specific wards or units, or particular cases, enabling management to make informed decisions on how to optimise processes and enhance the quality of care.”
 
Results
Healthcare-as-a-service has already started delivering immediate benefits to Busamed’s operations, with a number of promising business outcomes still to come. The immediate benefits include:
 
•A Connected network of hospitals… so that a rich history of patient data (including results from radiology, pathology and other labs) can be accessed by authorised staff, irrespective of which Busamed hospital one visits. This helps achieve informed, accurate and timely patient diagnoses.
•Cost-efficiencies… without having to suffer any capex outlays for their IT systems, Busamed is able to invest its working capital into the operations of each facility, and is now “cutting the ribbon” on new hospitals at an impressive rate.
•Integration between service providers within each facility… some areas of Busamed’s hospitals – such as radiology or cardiology, for example – are independently-managed. The extensible technology platform is able to integrate data from these various parties, offering care-givers a singular, comprehensive and trusted view of the patient.
•Enhanced productivity… from integration with biometric clock-in solutions, to increased automation, and fully-digitised patient records that reduce time spent recording and searching for patient information, Busamed staff are able to focus their energies on delivery exceptional care.
•Ease-of-expansion… as new Busamed hospitals or clinics are built in the future, the cloud-based architecture allows management to quickly roll-out the relevant Healthcare technology stack.
•Great patient experiences… beginning with an admissions process that takes just a few minutes, care services are delivered swiftly and efficiently at every step of the way. The benefits may be as simple as improving patients’ levels of happiness at being more informed or involved, or as critical as literally saving someone’s life.
 
Perhaps most exciting, Moodley adds, is the new innovation opportunities. 
 
“What’s most fantastic is our ability to continually enrich and innovate using the solution, to build new features on top of the SAP core that are applicable to us specifically. Innovation is the driving force behind Busamed’s inception, and will be one of our key differentiators in the market over the coming years.”