Nomabhongo Masana

Nomabhongo Masana has a national diploma (2013) and a BTech (2014) in information technology from the Central University of Technology (CUT). Masana is currently enrolled for a master’s in information technology under the Distributed Networks and Systems Group at CUT.

Masana’s interest is in cloud computing, the offers and benefits provided by this emerging technology, and how it can be incorporated into the health sector to improve the quality of healthcare services and medical research. Her study proposes an integrated, cloud-based, electronic medical record (EMR) system, which can be adopted to address challenges with paper-based medical records and the quality of healthcare. The aim is to do this by integrating the various existing EMR system into one central data storage space in the cloud to facilitate the storage and sharing of medical data.

Masana’s study will develop and present a framework which can be used in the Free State for the adoption of an integrated cloud-based EMR system, addressing the technological, organisational and environmental factors that may influence the adoption of the proposed system in the context of the province’s healthcare system.

Masana has published two peer-reviewed papers on the adoption of cloud-based EMR systems, one in an the internal CUT journal (Interim in 2016), and another at a conference in 2017. She was awarded a National Research Foundation Innovation Master’s Scholarship for 2017, and a CUT research grant for 2016 and 2017 to complete her master’s degree.