Join us at the 11th Healthcare Innovation Summit Africa (HISA) on May 27 – 28, 2026, at The Indaba Hotel & Conference Centre, Johannesburg. This summit is a key meeting point for leaders in healthcare and technology. HISA will focus on digital transformation in healthcare, aiming to improve accessibility and patient care across the continent.

The conference will address key issues in African healthcare, emphasizing technology’s role in universal healthcare. Topics include managing healthcare records, AI applications, counterfeit drugs, healthcare financing, infrastructure, HealthTech innovation, security risks, data management, and cloud storage. It will also explore predicting pandemics and handling public health emergencies with technology, showcasing innovative solutions to improve healthcare access.

APCC CEO, Motlalentoa Motsoane is speaking at 15:20 on 28 May – Session: Modernising Health Financing and Insurance Models.

Synopsis below:

As South Africa confronts an escalating quadruple burden of disease, the sustainability of healthcare financing models is increasingly under pressure. Yet one of the most significant gaps in both funding and digital health system design remains palliative care (PC); a critical component of the healthcare continuum that is still poorly understood, inadequately financed, and insufficiently represented in national health data systems.

Current healthcare funding models continue to prioritise high-cost procedures and acute interventions, often rewarding activity rather than patient outcomes. In contrast, palliative care, particularly home- and community-based care, remains marginalised despite its proven role in improving patient dignity, quality of life, continuity of care, and overall system efficiency.

A major contributing factor is the absence of integrated and adaptable data systems capable of capturing the full value and impact of palliative care interventions. This has reinforced ongoing misconceptions that palliative care is limited to end-of-life care, while making it difficult to demonstrate broader clinical, social, and economic outcomes.

While organisations such as the APCC have invested in palliative care data systems, significant challenges remain around usability, flexibility, interoperability, and accessibility across the broader healthcare sector. Many existing systems were developed for limited organisational or membership-based use and are not yet equipped to support integrated national reporting, dynamic funding models, or coordinated care across homes, communities, hospices, clinics, and hospitals.

Most healthcare data systems are still designed around institutional and episodic models of care rather than continuous, person-centred care. This creates major gaps in how palliative care is captured and measured, particularly in community- and home-based settings where frontline teams often work in low-resource environments with limited connectivity, fragmented systems, workforce constraints, and heavy administrative burdens. As a result, much of the work undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, caregivers, and home-based practitioners remains under-recorded or invisible within traditional reporting and reimbursement structures.

Without practical and responsive data systems that reflect the realities of care on the ground, healthcare funders and policymakers struggle to quantify the true value of palliative care interventions. This directly affects funding inclusion, reimbursement structures, policy prioritisation, and the integration of palliative care into broader healthcare reform initiatives such as National Health Insurance (NHI).

This session will explore the growing disconnect between current healthcare financing models and the realities of palliative care delivery, particularly regarding data, measurement, and system design. Rather than presenting a definitive solution, the discussion aims to challenge the audience to consider what more responsive, interoperable, and outcomes-driven health data systems could look like, and how technology, innovation, and collaboration might help bridge existing gaps in funding, policy integration, and patient-centred care within the South African healthcare context.

Key areas for discussion include:
• Tracking patient outcomes and quality-of-life indicators.
• Generating evidence for reimbursement and policy inclusion.
• Integrating palliative care into mainstream healthcare financing models.
• Improving healthcare resource allocation and continuity of care.
• Supporting community-based care models aligned to patient needs.
• Strengthening alignment between NHI implementation and palliative care frameworks.
• Exploring the role of technology and data innovation in shaping future financing models.