The successful implementation of an Enterprise Content Management system within the South African Healthcare Services Sector

The research study was directed at determining the factors that contributed to the successful implementation of an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system at the Khayelitsha Hospital in the Western Cape, South Africa. Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems form a very vital component of any national healthcare information technology infrastructure. The successful implementation of an ECM system at the Khayelitsha Hospital in the Western Cape therefore assumes definite relevance, as it would appear from the literature that the successful implementation, management, and utilisation of EMR systems are extremely difficult to achieve in practice. A multidisciplinary literature study and analysis was undertaken to gain an understanding of EMR systems and their deployment. An empirical study was then undertaken to learn from the practical, successful implementation, utilisation and management of such a system at the Khayelitsha Hospital. The empirical study constituted a narrative enquiry to learn from the first hand experiences of the relevant people involved. As such the research study was therefore essentially qualitative and analytically descriptive in nature. An important finding of the research study was that the ability able to integrate a traditional healthcare culture of paper-based clinical records with an electronic medical record access system was one of the key determinants that gave rise to the successful deployment of the ECM system.