With this in mind, Altron’s PMAs – including HealthOne Enterprise – have been built on secure‑by‑design principles to protect occupational health data without compromising accessibility.
“There’s an audit trail of what changed and when it was changed, which makes it possible to trace user activity from the back end. It also ensures data integrity,” says Altron HealthTech Compliance and Deputy Information Officer Annelize de Bruyn.
Philip adds that the company’s secure-by-design principles ensure auditability, traceability, and accountability. This not only makes it possible to trace activities from the back end, but also holds the end users accountable as the ones that take action within the application.
Trust Starts With Consent
Trust between patients and their doctors – or occupational health and safety clinics – begins with consent. This is why maintaining legal and ethical standards, and complying with basic healthcare legislation, like the POPIA act, is no longer optional in a digital landscape, but a legal necessity.
Many people are still uneasy about storing personal and sensitive information on the cloud. Similarly, more traditional healthcare service providers will still opt for paper-based health records because it feels familiar.
“What they don’t consider is that information in a paper environment can very easily become untraceable, and there’s no governance or security around it,” highlights Philip.
“Applications like HealthONE Enterprise, however, empower employees to control how their health data is used, while giving organisations transparent audit trails to keep track of compliance.”
HealthOne Enterprise digitises electronic health records (eHRs) and emphasises optimal security with access control, user privilege and document encryption, among other industry-leading security measures. This establishes the appropriate legal foundation to meet POPIA standards, assisting healthcare professionals on their compliance journeys.
“If you’ve got consent from your patients and you’re confident that you can trace your actions at any time, then you’re better able to fulfil your duty as a doctor while ensuring regulatory compliance,” says De Bruyn.
Philip adds that enhanced security measures like user access control and document encryption result in the patient feeling more comfortable to share their information. “My consent that I give to the enterprise is based on the knowledge that my data is secured,” he says.
Breaking Down Siloes
Healthcare can be a complex web of activities, whether it’s at an individual primary healthcare (PHC) level or an occupational health and safety (OHS) level. But many of the functionalities involved – like human resources (HR), lab work, or medical devices – often operate in siloes. As a result, data often becomes fragmented and, ultimately, clinical outcomes suffer. Clinicians waste time and resources, while patients waste their money.
However, HealthOne Enterprise acts as “a single source of truth”, as Philip puts it, with an aim to integrate traditionally disparate systems.
“HealthOne brings lab results in, integrates device data, and connects human resource data and employee demographics, with everything happening in one single repository,” he says.
This integration unlocks significant operational efficiencies. For example, the system achieves bidirectional communication with HR systems. Companies can use an employee’s job specification from HR to create specific clinical workflows that determine their fitness for work. Their clinical outcomes can even be pushed back to automated Time and Attendance systems, stopping employees from being able to clock in if they’re not fit to work.
“HR doesn’t have to manually monitor and track each employee. Everything is automated in the background, saving the end user time, money and productivity,” says Philip.
Governance as Continuous Accountability
While many organisations treat governance as a checkbox exercise, Altron HealthTech believes true compliance means a continuous flow of accountability.
With a product like HealthONE Enterprise, which tracks and audits every access granted, every system change, and every report filed, accountability is intrinsic to the system. Ensuring that these security measures are in place means HealthONE’s accountability is as much a part of the product’s development as security is.
“This approach ensures that compliance is not once-off or sporadic. The flow is continuous,” says Philip.
De Bruyn adds that Altron HealthTech’s commitment to an integrated, interoperable, secure and compliant digital environment ultimately enables safer outcomes for a clinician or enterprise.
“Ensuring security and having an audit trail is crucial when it comes to managing risk. This is why ensuring safer outcomes for our clients and their patients is a priority for Altron HealthTech. It’s the ultimate measure of trust in the digital era,” she concludes.
