Healthcare coding is for more than getting claims paid. It allows clinical information to be recorded consistently, services to be described accurately, medicines and devices to be identified reliably and health system activity to be analysed in different settings. In South Africa, those functions have developed in separate, overlapping and often poorly governed layers. The …
Is quality measurement about proving, or improving? Is it about helping clinicians provide better care, or about satisfying funders and regulators? The answer has usually been: both. The tension between proving and improving explains much of where quality measurement has been, and why it may need a new direction. In the United States, quality measurement …
My previous article [1] discussed the fact that large language models lack a formal model of the physical world in which care takes place. This is a problem for AI in healthcare. Healthcare may be described in language but health care, disease, and its treatment are not linguistic phenomena. They are part of the physical …
Five ideas from a new paper In an earlier article, I wrote about artificial intelligence (AI) world models: systems built to represent how the world behaves and changes over time, rather than working only via language and other static data. An April 2026 paper (preprint) takes that idea into medicine. Its main argument is that …
South Africans love to talk rugby. And right now, there’s a lot to talk about. Not only are the Springboks the reigning men’s Rugby World Cup champions but South Africa’s U20 side won the World Rugby U20 Championship in 2025, the Blitzboks finished top of the 2025/26 HSBC SVNS league table, and the U18 side …
Part 2 of 2. Part 1 is here. In my first article, I described the patchwork (“duct tape”) that keeps many public hospitals going: paper records, siloed electronic systems, shared documents, local lists, WhatsApp messages and a great deal of human memory and improvisation. What should hospitals do about this? A March 2026 paper from …
Part 1 of 2. Everyday care in a South African hospital A sick child arrives in casualty. A clerk records the admission. The doctor writes in the paper folder. Blood tests and x-rays are ordered. Results appear later on a laboratory portal, imaging in another system. The ward team keeps its own task lists and …
Years ago, my hospital in the US was considering buying an anaesthesia information system. This was a major purchase in the 1-2 million dollar range. The system would automatically record vital signs, document anaesthesia care and become part of the daily workflow of every operating room (OR) in a large academic medical center. During the …
Most South Africans have never heard of Nipah virus, which appears on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) list of emerging infectious threats. Nipah outbreaks, including the current one in India, are rare, but the disease has severe consequences, with reported fatality rates of 40-75%. There’s no proven antiviral treatment and no widely available vaccine. WHO …
Nipah virus and SA’s new air quality regulations Read More »
Maternal and child health (MCH) outcomes are good indicators of whether a health system works, and for whom. In rich countries, preventable maternal deaths are concentrated in poor neighbourhoods and marginalised populations. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) they reflect deeper and broader system failures that overwhelm clinical services. In both contexts, digital twins offer …
