While practicing surgery in both the academic and private environment, I became interested in the creation and value chain associated with electronic health records. While primarily trained as a clinician I have developed the necessary domain knowledge and expertise for the implementation, support and management of electronic clinical and research record management. I have led the teams that implemented and supported electronic data collection instruments in clinical and research areas in the FHS at Wits. This includes the management of the staff, hardware and infrastructure, budget and communication between different academic faculties and providers. The University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committees, the Information Technology, Research and Legal departments were partners in the journey to understanding and putting in place the processes to ensure that our curation of electronic health information conforms with international best practice regarding secrecy, security and privacy. The clinical record system includes an electronic discharge summary implemented in 2015, now with over 85 000 records, forms the corpus of data for under and postgraduate clinical, computational and biomedical research. The same team implemented REDCap at the University of the Witwatersrand Faculty of Health Sciences in 2012 which has now grown to be one of the larger REDCap consortium members globally. Our REDCap administrators contribute to the North America REDCap Con and hosts the regional Africa REDCap Con. The REDCap team at Wits FHS provides training at an introductory and intermediate level for users from within and without the University. The current application will build on the existing capacity to fulfil the growing need for a sustainable platform for Data Science Research in Health care and in particular biomedical informatics.
