Mediclinic kicks off social innovation initiative

MUMBAI, INDIA: South Africa based Mediclinic has kicked off its social innovation initiative. As a first, it is centralizing is electronic patient record system (EPRS).

For this, it has deployed Hitachi Clinical Repository for connected health as the foundation for its unified EPRS. Mediclinic is now successfully moving all its image and data files into a centralized clinical repository.

Mediclinic Southern Africa is a private hospital group operating in South Africa and Namibia that provides acute care, specialist-oriented, multi-disciplinary hospital services and other related offerings. The organization wanted to build a connected health environment that to unify patient data across more than 50 locations into a single, unified database, but had struggled due to lack of integration between its medical information systems.

For Mediclinic, the project’s primary objective was to build a secure information infrastructure and centralized file repository that improve physician access to health records, support better outcomes and reduce healthcare costs for its patients.

HCR for connected health uses Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) technology to form a multipurpose archive that enables all clinical and nonclinical data to be stored, backed up, preserved and retrieved on a single platform. By aggregating data from previously siloed applications and making it shareable across multiple caregivers, HCR provides healthcare providers with direct access to a patient’s entire medical record, regardless of their location.

“When we first implemented HCR we were looking at it only from an image-storage perspective. We soon realized it could ingest and store any type of information—from PDFs and Microsoft® Office documents, to laparoscopy videos and all kinds of images, both DICOM and non-DICOM,” said Deon Myburgh, ICT operations manager at Mediclinic Southern Africa. “Our company is on a strong and rapid growth path. As we look into the future, Hitachi Data Systems brings the right combination of product reliability and flexibility to be the best strategic partner for us.”

Kevin Eggleston, Senior Vice President, Social Innovation, Hitachi Data Systems, said, “This is the promise of The Internet of Things that matter and it’s gratifying to see our connected solutions at work in the real world. These advancements will not only enable Mediclinic to streamline operations and improve data accessibility for its staff, but will help to enhance patient care and deliver a better overall healthcare experience to its customers.”