Hospitals
ER Consulting Inc. is the largest independent emergency medicine management company in South Africa and currently operates emergency units in all of the major hospital groups in South Africa. ER Consulting Inc, with its partner companies, First Care Solutions (Pty) Ltd and the Africa Institute of Emergency Medicine (Pty) Ltd, currently offer turnkey emergency unit management to private hospitals in South Africa and Africa.
With more than 20 years’ experience in the field, ER Consulting Inc. has evolved into the preferred place for doctors to work and for hospital groups to contract with. This statement is not to be taken lightly and is born out of the fact that our doctor profile and depth, administrative infrastructure (FCS (Pty) Ltd), and training platform (AIEM (Pty) Ltd) are unsurpassed.
Emergency Units are challenging places to manage and operate. In a country like South Africa, where there are numerous pressures both internally and externally on emergency units and the doctors, a hospital should consider experience as a significant differentiator in the marketplace. Experience in implementation and rollout, expertise in risk mitigation and medico-legal matters, experience in scheduling, administration and training are only gained through years of working in the industry.
ER Consulting Inc. doctors are amongst the best trained, most vetted and credentialed in the industry. Together with our specialist emergency medicine management team (and our soon to be launched Specialist Governance Inc), ER Consulting Inc. can offer every conceivable emergency medicine service to your hospital.
Emergency Unit Locations
Find the closest ER Conculting managed Emergency Unit near you
Emergency Unit Locations
What We Offer
ER Consulting Inc. provides an outsourced doctor model to operate emergency medicine units in hospitals around South Africa. Various financial models and operating systems are available depending on the requirements of the hospital. Currently, ER Consulting Inc. manages 25 emergency departments nationally.
Services offered by ER Consulting Inc. to prospective hospitals include:
- Specialised Emergency Unit Management (Turnkey)
- Sourcing, accrediting and employing emergency trained doctors
- Standardised Policies & Procedures
- All stationery for the operating of the doctors’ practice
- All administration of the doctors’ practice
- Standardised Clinical Protocols (tailored to the individual hospital requirements)
- Clinical Governance Program for the unit and the doctors
- Management Dashboards
- Clinical Scorecard
- Marketing & Event Management
- Facilitation of advanced life support courses
- CME / CPD meetings coordinated
- Morbidity & Mortality Meetings
- Numerous training and other value-added services are offered to our patients.
Electronic Medical Record
Two years ago, ER Consulting Inc. embarked on an ambitious project to build an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system specifically for deployment in the emergency units managed by the practice.
The aim of creating our own EMR was specifically to digitally transform the practice and create the ability to manage the massive amount of healthcare data emanating from the practice.
The vision of creating useful data sets to better manage the practice and improve patient outcomes is now a reality through the Care First Platform.
In order to achieve the deployment of the EMR in the emergency units, we designed the process flows using the knowledge and experience of the senior doctors, the skills of our administrators and marketers, and the technical skills of our developers.
A true team effort has delivered a South African EMR integrated with our telemedicine platform, some partner hospitals, laboratories, our practice management application, billing and switching functionality.
With the EMR now fully deployed in all the 25 ER Consulting Inc. managed emergency units, we are the first practice to deliver real time views and metrics of the emergency unit to our partner hospitals.
The data gathered from the EMR is now integrated with our training data, financial data, scheduling and human resource data to provide a near live view of the emergency unit workings through the Care First Platform.
In time, additional metrics from the EMR will be added to the Care First Platform dashboards to further enhance the information, ultimately automating all reporting to management in real time.
The EMR is a web based software that is enabled through our own Wi-Fi infrastructure at each hospital. The EMR is compliant with all security and confidentiality requirements in South African law and is securely retained on our servers that are protected by active security protocols.
The EMR is currently only available in ER Consulting Inc. managed emergency units, however consideration is being given to licensing this product to other emergency practices in the future.
Hospitalist
ER Consulting Inc. currently deploys hospitalist doctors in emergency units across the nation. These hospitalists are highly experienced senior doctors who specialise in providing essential services in intensive care units, high care, theatres, and emergency units.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that hospital specialists were frequently overwhelmed by patient volumes. As a result, patients in the wards often experienced extended wait times for necessary procedures.
Introducing hospitalist doctors to support these specialists significantly enhanced patient care in high care and ICU wards. This dedicated service ensured efficient and high-quality procedural care, thereby allowing specialists to prioritise patient consultations and surgeries in the operating theatre. The success of this initiative has led to its establishment as a standard practice in multiple hospitals.
Typically a hospitalist will be asked by a specialist to assist with the following procedures:
- Central line placement and replacement
- Intubations
- Ultrasound guided line placement
- Chest drain placement
- Placement of cannulas for chemotherapy or dialysis
- Procedural sedation
- Resuscitations
These procedures are claimed for by the hospitalist doctor directly from the medical aid.
Neither the specialist or the hospital incurs any cost.
The hospitalists are also able to provide additional services in the hospital directly. These services include the following:
- Night time ward rounds with the nursing managers of various units
- Assistance with resuscitations in wards
- General nursing advice and assistance
- Nurse training in resuscitation and peri-collapse scenario
- Procedural sedation
- Procedures that nurses are need of assistance with
ER Consulting Inc. offers hospitalist services to hospitals in situations where improved availability of onsite senior clinicians is essential, especially during nighttime hours.
These services are beneficial in instances where specialists may face delays in attending to their patients, reside far from the hospital, or encounter unsafe travel conditions at night.
For further details about our hospitalist services, please contact us at info@erconsulting.co.za with the subject line “HOSPITALIST.”
