How do COHSASA standards function

A healthcare facility has to go through the following steps to attain COHSASA standards: – 

Assists the staff: First, the body helps the team understand the requirements of the standards to attain accreditation, followed by assisting them in working towards achieving those standards, including quality management programs. 

One-Week Onsite Assessment: Following the training process, a team from COHSASA conducts a baseline survey of the hospital or clinic for one week by staying in the province. Standards are measured on specific criteria defined by the body.  

Assessing the Gaps: The report prepared in the survey helps the hospital assess the physical gaps in achieving compliance. The duration of the program offered by COHSASA would be inversely dependent upon the maintenance quality and the documents supporting them, i.e., Higher quality means a lesser period and vice versa. 

CoQIS: – Hospital staff is trained to use the web-based quality improvement Information system of COHSASA, CoQIS, to conduct self-evaluation activities for quality improvement. COHSASA can monitor the progress using the same portal. 

Final Assessment: – Finally, an external survey is conducted by panellists who were not present during the assistance process. Based on the results, accreditation is granted to the hospital or clinic. 

Following are the elements used to set healthcare standards in the Healthcare facilities of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, by COHSASA to enhance the quality of the healthcare industry in the region. Vikas 2.0 Hospital ERP software and Netra 2.0 Eye hospital software installations are present in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Cameroon, and other countries in the African region.

COHSASA standards – Enhancing Healthcare – KwaZulu-Natal

A research study was conducted to see the impact of COHSASA on the KwaZulu-Natal Healthcare system, which included 20 hospitals in the region. Each standard was judged based on different parameters. Eight indicators based on which hospital standards were accredited are:

Nurse Perceptions: – Since nurses spend the maximum amount of time with the patients, they play a critical role in setting and meeting the standards. Parameters like nurses’ perception of the work environment, the type of relationship shared with the doctors and departments, the quality of patient care offered, and the teamwork environment were used to set work-staff standards.

Patient Satisfaction: – Often, Patient experience is not given priority in setting standards in developing/underdeveloped nations. However, COHSASA realised the importance of patients’ opinions and dedicated parameters to judge the patient’s experience while setting standards for the healthcare units. 

Patient Medication Education: – One of the challenges faced by African hospitals is the delivery of correct pharmacotherapy and adherence to proper medication by the patients, for which patient medication education becomes imperative. In a region where the rarest of the rarest diseases are common, Africa, the need for appropriate pharma professionals and appropriate medication delivery becomes an essential factor that makes a difference. 

Medical Record completeness, retrieval, and accuracy: – One crucial aspect of delivering quality patient treatment and experience requires the proper collection of all the necessary information and easy retrieval of the data as and when needed. COHSASA has enlisted the following elements as required to be present in the patient data: –

Patient Admission: – Patient identification number, date, time, history, examination findings, diagnosis, treatment plan, medicines ordered, and doctor attending

Patient Discharge: – patient identification number, discharge date, discharge diagnosis, discharge plan, medicines, and the doctor attending. The ease of retrieval of the data mentioned above and its accuracy are other requirements deemed necessary by COHSASA.

Completeness of peri-operative notes: – This segment includes the preparation, collection, and maintenance of proper documents like patient reports, anaesthetic reports (containing information regarding anaesthesia), and all other clinical equipment reports used during and pre-operational stage. It is considered an essential aspect of risk mitigation and the clinical communication process. 

However, every hospital might not have operational activities being conducted in their hospitals/clinics; thus, there are different elements prepared as per the type of healthcare body. 

Labelling of ward stock medications: – Wrong labelling of medicines could prove fatal for the inpatients, thus labelling of ward stock medication – name, drug contents, strength, batch number, and expiration date for all containers of drugs sent to the ward are necessary under COHSASA standards.

Not only that, but ward members must also have complete knowledge about which drug is to be administered and when. Proper record maintenance for the same is imperative under COHSASA.

Hospital Sanitation: – Lastly, proper cleanliness and sanitation (water, toilet paper, soap, etc.) are a few elements included under the management effectiveness of COHSASA standards.

Results: – When hospitals were compared on the pre and post-COHSASA standard implementation, significant improvements in hospital maintenance using CMMS software, workforce safety, infrastructure, and patient experience were evident.

As healthcare providers across Nigeria, Kenya, and Ethiopia race to digitalise, they face a common hurdle: the “Infrastructure Gap.” While cloud-based systems are trending globally, the reality of intermittent internet and power fluctuations makes purely online platforms a risky bet for high-volume African hospitals.

In 2026, the most resilient facilities are choosing an Offline-First approach to ensure that patient care never stops, even when the connection does.

Beating the Connectivity Bottleneck

In many regions, dedicated high-speed internet is either prohibitively expensive or unstable. An Offline Hospital Management System eliminates this dependency. By hosting your data on a local server, your Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are accessible instantly over your local network, ensuring zero latency during doctor consultations.

Mobile Money & Local Payment Integration

African healthcare is uniquely driven by mobile payments. A truly localised system must do more than just record data; it must integrate with the financial heartbeat of the region. Teja 2.0 is designed to sync with platforms like M-Pesa and local banking gateways, allowing your Hospital Billing Software to reconcile payments in real-time without requiring a constant uplink to the cloud.

Managing Resources in Real-Time

For multi-speciality clinics, keeping track of high-value assets is critical. Whether it’s managing a busy Pharmacy Inventory or tracking samples in a Pathology Lab, an offline system ensures that stock levels and test results are updated the moment a transaction occurs. This prevents the “double-entry” errors common when staff try to sync manual records after an internet outage.

Data Sovereignty and Compliance

With the rise of data protection acts across the continent, keeping patient records on-site is often the simplest way to ensure compliance. An on-premises hospital ERP allows you to be the sole custodian of your data, protecting sensitive information from international cloud breaches while meeting local regulatory standards for healthcare data residency.

Conclusion on hospital management

COHSASA standards have been continuously working towards improving the healthcare industry of Africa, laying more emphasis on the measurements of clinical outcomes and increasing attention towards evidence-based standards. It works throughout Africa and helps African nations’ healthcare systems attain global standards by spreading quality protocols and standards followed by these countries among each other, integrating them under one standard body – COHSASA. The accreditation body has been collaborating with local bodies of the provinces to attain the most fruitful outcomes, like the one achieved in the KwaZulu-Natal region of South Africa.

SA-HIS Vikas 2.0 and Netra 2.0 support COHSASA-compliant reporting for hospitals in Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa. For the full Africa deployment overview including Kenya SHA/NHIF integration and Somalia deployments, see the Africa hospital software hub.

Call us to learn more about hospital management software modules, small hospital software, implementation and training plans, and pricing for African regions