Liezl Van Dyk

Creating Business Intelligence from Course Management Systems

Purpose – This article seeks to address the interface between individual learning facilitators that use course management systems (CMS) data to support decision‐making and course design and institutional infrastructure providers that are responsible for institutional business intelligence.Design/methodology/approach – The design of a data warehouse is proposed that draw data from institutional transactional systems to provide decision support to individual action researchers. A prototype data warehouse is built to evaluate by means of a case study the usefulness validity of analyses performed.Findings – Many facilitators of learning draw manually the same type of queries from CMS data for purposes of action research. On the other hand, more and more HEI infrastructure providers create data warehouses to support many kinds of decision‐making. It is possible and valuable to follow a business intelligence approach to facilitate the queries drawn by individual action researchers from course management systems...

Towards a Regional Innovation System for Telemedicine in South Africa

The South African government identified telemedicine as a strategic tool to improve delivery of equitable healthcare and educational services. However, the advancement of telemedicine is hindered by the fact that not many South African medical practitioners dwell in the domain of information and communication technicians and visa versa. Attempts to advance healthcare in South Africa are disparate and parties doing complementary work, often do not know of each other. The purpose of this project is to come up with a framework that can be used as a business model towards the establishing of a regional innovation system (RIS) for the advancement of telemedicine, firstly in South Africa.

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR EQUIPMENT ALLOCATION IN A TELEMEDICINE REFERRAL NETWORK

Telemedicine applications have had much success in strengthening health systems worldwide. Unfortunately, many systems are implemented without decisions based on proper needs assessments. In South Africa, this ‘technology push’ approach has led to a large amount of equipment standing dormant. It is proposed that the potential of telemedicine be measured prior to implementation, thus ‘pulling’ the technology towards a clinical need. A decision support system is developed that uses health informatics and computational intelligence to determine the need for telemedicine and to allocate equipment in a network of facilities to achieve the best cost benefit. The system facilitates the collection and storage of electronic health record (EHR) data in a data warehouse. A linear programming model is used with a genetic algorithm. The system was developed and tested for the South African public health sector, using data from 27 hospitals in the Western Cape Province. Results have shown that if telemedicine workstations with specific peripheral equipment, as determined by the algorithm, were implemented in the given period, an estimated R8.7 million in referral costs could have been saved for the 27 hospitals. Thus the case study provided evidence for the benefits of implementation in the chosen network of hospitals. This new application of health informatics could provide telemedicine management with a useful tool for making implementation decisions based on evidence. Future work would include the development of similar systems for other markets. OPSOMMING ’n Verskeidenheid telegeneeskunde toepassings het reeds groot sukses behaal in die bevordering van gesondheidsdienste wereldwyd. Ongelukkig word tegnologie dikwels geimplementeer sonder om besluitneming te baseer op behoorlike behoefte bepalings. In Suid-Afrika, het hierdie ‘tegnologie stoot’ benadering gelei tot ’n groot hoeveelhede ongebruikte toerusting. Daar word voorgestel dat die potensiaal van telemedisyne gemeet moet word, voor implementering, om sodoende tegnologie te ‘trek’ na kliniese behoefte. ’n Besluitneming ondersteuning stelsel is ontwikkel wat gebruik maak van gesondheidsorg informatika en rekenkundige intelligensie, om die behoefte vir tele-geneeskunde te bepaal en daarvolgens toerusting toe te ken aan ’n netwerk van gesondheidsorg fasiliteite, om die beste kostevoordeel te bereik. Die stelsel fasiliteer die versamel en berg van elektroniese mediese rekord data in ’n data stoor. ’n Lineere programmering model word gebruik met ’n genetiese algoritme opgelos. Die stelsel is ontwikkel en getoets vir die Suid-Afrikaanse openbare gesondheidsektor, met behulp van data van 27 hospitale in die Wes-Kaap Provinsie. Resultate toon dat indien telemedisyne werkstasies met spesifieke aanvullende toerusting, soos bepaal deur die algoritme, beskikbaar was in die gegewe tydperk, ’n beraamde R8.7 miljoen gespaar kon word met betrekking tot pasient verwysingkoste. Die gevallestudie toon dus van die voordele van implementering in die gekose netwerk van hospitale. Hierdie nuwe toepassing van gesondheidsorg informatika kan dien as ’n nuttige hulpmiddel vir tele-geneeskunde besluitnemers in tele-geneeskunde om besluite gebaseer op konkrete bewyse. Toekomstige werk sal die ontwikkeling van soortgelyke stelsels vir ander markte insluit.AAA