Page 42 - IJSA, Vol. 6, No 2, 2023

International Journal of Science Annals, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2023
рrint ISSN: 2617-2682; online ISSN: 2707-3637; DOI:10.26697/ijsa

SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES. Health Care Sciences

ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Conceptualizing a Model for Cloud-Based

Hospital Management Systems for the
South African Public Health Sector

Authors’ Contribution: 1 ABCDEFG 2 ABCDEFG
A – Study design; Magudulela T. S. , Kalema B. M. ,
B – Data collection; Segooa M. A. 1 ABEG
C – Statistical analysis; 1 Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa
D – Data interpretation; 2 University of Mpumalanga, South Africa
E – Manuscript preparation;
F – Literature search; Received: 05.07.2023; Accepted: 10.08.2023; Published: 25.12.2023
G – Funds collection
Abstract
Background and Real-time access of information in the healthcare environment is essential, as it
Aim of Study: not only helps medical personnel to have adequate and timely information, but it
also assists patients to be served more easily. Hospitals in rural areas are
operating at a low bandwidth and have poor IT infrastructure that causes
intermittent networks leading to disruptions and slow service delivery. This
necessitates the Hospital Management System (HMS) to be deployed in the cloud
environment to reduce the challenges leading to poor service delivery.
The aim of the study: to develop a model for cloud-based HMS for the South
African public health sector.
Material and Methods: This study identified three public district municipality hospitals in Gauteng
Province, South Africa, that were already using HMS and used them for data
collection. Each hospital had up to 50 healthcare workers, and this formed the
population of 150 from the three hospitals, from which a sample size of 108
respondents was selected. Data were collected using a closed-ended
questionnaire and analyzed quantitatively using SPSS v25.
Results: The results demonstrated that the suggested model has a good prediction power
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of 60.9% (R =0.609) and that with the exception of environmental aspects, the
rest of the constructs has a significant contribution to the successful
implementation of the cloud-based HMS. Social aspects had the highest
prediction power of 60.0% (β=0.600) at p=0.001; followed by risk analysis and
control with 41.3% (β=0.413) at p=0.009. On the other hand, environmental
aspects had the least and non-significant prediction of 12.3%.
Conclusions: This study contributes to the ongoing call to have seamless healthcare provision
systems. The model developed in this study extends the research of modernizing
healthcare provision by leveraging technological innovations.
Keywords: cloud computing, hospital management systems, healthcare, public, South Africa
Copyright: © 2023 Magudulela T. S., Kalema B. M., Segooa M. A. Published by Archives of
International Journal of Science Annals
DOI and UDC DOI https://doi.org/10.26697/ijsa.2023.2.5 UDC 614.2(680)
Conflict of interests: The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests
Peer review: Double-blind review
Source of support: This research was supported by HCD-INTERBURSARY received from the
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
Information about Magudulela Thembokuhle Sheshile – https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5192-7621;
the authors: Master of Computing, Junior Lecturer, Department of End-User Computing,
Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa.
Kalema Mathius Billy (Corresponding Author) – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
2405-9088; [email protected]; Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science,
Professor, School of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, University of
Mpumalanga, Mbombela, South Africa.
Segooa Mmatshuene Anna – https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4190-8256; Doctor of
Computing, Lecturer, Department of Informatics, Tshwane University of
Technology, Pretoria, South Africa.
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