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How Digital Tech is Making Healthcare Smarter

August 2, 2021

By Nick Durrant

It may sound counterintuitive but one of the major challenges governments across the globe faced at the height of the coronavirus pandemic was actually keeping people away from hospitals. In part, because of an inability to scale up human labour and resources fast enough to meet increased demand and also because of a need to minimise the number of people gathering at any specific place.

But what did this mean for patients who needed to visit a hospital for something other than COVID? Well, they had to find alternative ways to secure treatment without visiting a medical professional in person.

Nick Durrant is the CEO of Bluegrass Digital — **Nick Durrant, CEO of Bluegrass Digital**

This need to access decentralised care has accelerated the use of emerging tech and digital solutions to enable remote care and improve healthcare outcomes in regions where access was previously unavailable.

Sure, many of these solutions and platforms existed pre-COVID, but their use drastically accelerated due to the pandemic.

Digital Healthcare in Action

In 2018, the World Health Organisation (WHO) grouped different digital healthcare technologies based on their primary target user-groups; these being client-oriented technologies, provider-oriented technologies, management-oriented technologies and data-oriented technologies.

Today, these groupings provide a nice guideline to explore exactly how digital technologies have strengthened global health systems for different stakeholders.

From a client/patient perspective, many of the barriers to the adoption of virtual consultations were lowered due to the pandemic, according to research from UK consulting firm, STL Partners.

These virtual consultations offer patients and doctors more flexibility by giving them the choice to interact when and how they wish.

Taking this a step further, portable examination kits – like the TytoHome mobile medical device, which was made available in South Africa by Discovery Health – can be used to allow patients to attend remotely-guided consultations with a doctor.

Fitted with a camera, thermometer, otoscope and stethoscope, the TytoHome device captures clinical standard images of the ear, throat and skin, for example, and then shares these images with a healthcare provider who can offer a diagnosis, treatment plan and provide a prescription, if needed, remotely.

For healthcare providers, digital transformation means that the days of physical paper charts are over.

When sharing information about patients between different departments or practices, cloud technologies provide a single access point so multiple doctors can view lab results and consult notes on a specific patient.

Signapps, a mobile-first communication and collaboration platform born in Cape Town, offers just that. The platform, which recently secured a multi-million rand contract with Britain’s National Health Services (NHS), enables multi-disciplinary teams of healthcare professionals to seamlessly work together to better care for their patients.

From a management perspective, digital strategies can be implemented to enhance operational efficiencies and reduce costs, while still providing a superior customer experience.

Data-Oriented Technology Can Streamline Administration Processes

Integrated digital technology ecosystems streamline administration processes, which increases overall efficiency and decreases patient waiting times.

Looking behind the scenes, a brand like Veeva Systems, for example, provides cloud marketing solutions for the healthcare sector.

Working with biotech and pharmaceutical companies including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Moderna, and Merck, Veeva’s cloud-based platform helps healthcare brands improve customer relationships, store and analyse data and keep track of industry regulations and clinical trials.

When looking at data-oriented technologies, electronic health records turn medical data into medical insights.

Using the cloud, medical researchers can mine the data to spot trends and even potentially avoid public health crises in the future. These insights also reveal how to streamline operations, improve patient experience and cut unnecessary costs.

Nick Durrant is the CEO of Bluegrass Digital.

Kelechi Deca

Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry

How to Tell if Your Website is POPIA Compliant

May 12, 2021

By Nick Durrant

The Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have a significant impact on websites and other digital platforms like social media, email marketing and eCommerce activities. Businesses have until 1 July 2021 to comply and to make their websites compliant.

POPIA and GDPR are data privacy laws that affect all business websites that collect data. The regulations are there to protect the online privacy of visitors and it covers how personal data is used and extracted when users visit and interact with a website.

Websites collect information in various ways and if a site uses analytics, opt-in forms, WordPress forms or email marketing, then they are collecting personal information. It is essential for businesses to obtain consent from visitors to collect and process their personal information.

Without consent, they cannot share this information with their marketing team as these regulations have been designed to protect people against data breaches. To avoid massive fines and lawsuits, businesses need to comply by informing users about the data that their website collects.

Here are some key areas that business leaders should review and discuss with their web development team.

Business websites must explicitly disclose if they are collecting personal data

They must inform visitors about why, how and where they store and process this personal data

Visitors may request a copy of the personal data collected from them

Visitors may request to have their personal data erased

Businesses must report serious breaches within 72 hours

More importantly, they need to review all data collection points on their website. This could include the registration page, IP addresses, a checkout page and other analytics. It is critical to cover all these areas and to obtain consent to collect information.

WordPress

The latest version of WordPress has built-in privacy and compliance features as part of its core. Merely by updating WordPress, one could ensure a higher level of compliance. Some new key features of WordPress include explicit consent, new data erase and export features and a policy generator.

WordPress previously stored data to ensure that people did not have to retype their personal information when making a new comment. Now, people have to click a checkbox to ensure their personal data is stored and reused.

The data export and erase feature enables businesses to easily export a user’s information into a .zip file or completely erase it from the database. This feature helps simplify managing visitor’s personal information.

WordPress also offers a privacy policy template that enables one to create an information page for visitors as to what data is stored and how the business manages it.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce also offers built-in tools to manage user privacy. One can enable the options for personal data retention, data erasure and a privacy policy. It is now easy to add the necessary information and disclosure to a WooCommerce privacy policy, especially related to shopping and payment security.

Contact forms

Visitors should be made aware that your site will collect their personal information when they complete any contact forms including registration forms and opt-in forms. One can easily create a tick box to accept the terms of service.

Cookies

One also needs to inform visitors that your website collects cookies.

Notifications

Businesses must inform visitors about any policy updates or data breaches, this can be done via email.

Analytics

Third-party services or plugins like Google Analytics and Google Adwords need to be managed correctly, one needs to anonymise the data before storage and processing. This could be complicated but there are POPIA and GDPR compliant plugins available, they automatically connect Google Analytics to your website and they can make data anonymisation easy.

Online payments

eCommerce businesses likely use a payment gateway and your own website may be collecting personal data before passing it onto the payment gateway. If so, the regulations require you to remove any personal information after a reasonable period.

Conclusion

Compliance reassures visitors, they are likely to share personal information when they understand how you will use their information. Adding compliance policies will certainly benefit your business, it will prevent future data breaches and protect personal and company information. It will also ensure that visitors’ personal information is not compromised.

Nick Durrant is the CEO of Bluegrass Digital