The private sector health information exchange, CareConnect, has been discontinued after its founding members concluded it was not financially sustainable.
The nonprofit CareConnect was formed eight years ago by six of SA’s biggest private hospital groups and medical scheme administrators to integrate their proprietary patient record systems, and went live in April 2022.
The aim was to improve care and reduce costs by providing clinicians with better information about their patients and reducing duplicate testing. By October 2023, CareConnect had more than 5.2-million patients on its system, and was optimistic about linking up with radiology and pathology groups.
CareConnect CEO Rolan Christian sent a letter to stakeholders last week saying the founding members had decided to close the scheme from August 1, due to slower-than-anticipated adoption by other industry players.
The founders were hospital groups Netcare, Life Healthcare and Mediclinic, as well as medical scheme administrators Discovery Health, Medscheme and Momentum Health.
“Adoption [by other players] was taking longer than anticipated, and the larger industry was needed to sustain us,” Christian told Business Day. Nor was CareConnect able to get the government to commit to the scheme, he said.
The intellectual property generated during the project would be retained, and might be used in the future, he added.
Discovery Health CEO Ronald Whelan said the founding members had invested more than R100m in CareConnect, and costs had risen as the rand depreciated against the dollar. Unlike health information exchanges in other countries, CareConnect was entirely funded by the private sector and had no public funding, he said.
‘Lost opportunity’
Radiological Society of SA (RSSA) executive director Richard Tuft said CareConnect’s closure was disappointing, as the scheme could have progressed to a fully portable electronic health record that could, in future, integrate with the public sector and the government’s National Health Insurance scheme.
“The private sector has lost the opportunity to demonstrate that, as a whole, it can provide an integrated health delivery platform. Abandoning CareConnect and regressing to a silo mentality with individual hospital groups and scheme administrators’ information systems is shortsighted and does the private sector no credit,” he said.
The RSSA had intended to join CareConnect, and had completed all the legal and technical work required to enable all radiologists and users of the health information exchange to have access to examinations.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.