B OccTher, Postgrad Dip Health Management
Milani has a degree in Occupational Therapy from the University Stellenbosch and a Post Graduate Diploma in Health Management from the University of Cape Town (UCT). She is currently enrolled for a Masters in Development Policy and Practice at UCT. Milani has more than (35) years of management experience in the Public Health Sector, with expertise in the area of Public Health Planning and Policy Development. She has a specific interest in the use of Health Information to inform planning and policy decision-making. Her current responsibilities include amongst others the development of systems and tools that could support evidence-based decision-making with the provision and presentation of information through an integrated repository drawing data and information from different sources. This includes the testing and design of the enterprise architecture for the development of an integrated patient-based information system for South Africa.
The new system cannot function without a comprehensive and interoperable digital information system. Clear and accurate data on users, providers, benefits, products, and outcomes are essential to a functioning system and this data must generate information that allows the Fund to measure equity, access of users to providers and benefits, and to plan strategic purchasing where there are inequities and deficiencies. Everything must be coded for the system to work, and these need to be universal codes, universally adopted (used by every role-player in both public and private sectors), and preferably international, to allow benchmarking.
Every person (health system user) in the country must have a portable electronic health record that every provider adds to each time they see the user and provide care. These unique patient records will belong to the patient (user) but allow every provider to build on an existing health record without duplicating tests, treatment, and care. The records will be carried on the Health Patient Record System (HPRS), which is already in place. Providers, managers, researchers, and policymakers must have access to the depersonalised data to manage individual patient care, and equity through strategic purchasing, and to develop improved and evolving policies.
The law (National Health Act and the NHI Bill) provides the framework and assigns powers to achieve this, but the Regulations and the data governance, operating procedures, standard dictionaries, normative standards for interoperability, standard analytics, and publication of indicators all need to be developed, documented, and managed.
