The 20 000+ partnership aims to save the lives of 20 000 infants each year by improving the quality of healthcare delivery. A key tenet of the project is to provide feedback to healthcare facilities, based on data relating to their performance. This data is gathered through the Department of Health Information System (DHIS). Nurses at every clinic countrywide gather data such as the number of patients they see, the number of antenatal visits, the number of HIV positive cases, etc. and send this to be captured into the DHIS. Provincial health managers use the DHIS information for health budgeting and staff deployment.
A major challenge for Perlcom was the decision not to duplicate data but to rather work with existing legacy systems. A robust system had to be designed to extract data from the DHIS system on a close-to-real-time basis. This data is then visualised in a graphical format, and used by quality assurance mentors to guide performance improvement in a large number of clinics and hospitals throughout KwaZulu-Natal. Because many facilities are not online, Perlcom had to devise an offline PDF data visualisation tool in addition to its real-time web-based graphing system.
This system is remarkable both for its addition of a powerful database layer over the legacy system, as well as its ability to quickly adapt to new requirements from the quality assurance team. This feature is possible because of its industrial-strength database, housed at UKZN, which was designed with flexibility in mind.