Constandious is a Lab Systems Analyst at Pathcare Pathology Laboratory in Cape Town. His research topic "Annotated Pathology Laboratory Workflows to comply with the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)" involved both IT and Law, which meant it required two supervisors, namely Professor Dalenca Pottas from the Faculties of Engineering, the Built Environment and Technology and Professor Andre Mukheibir from the Faculty of Law.
Taking into account that the POPIA only comes into effect on 1 July 2021, there were limited research papers available in South Africa for organisations that have implemented the legislation. In particular, the health care sector has been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic where processing of private patient information always comes under the spotlight.
Despite working in a busy pathology laboratory environment, technology became the greatest enabler to complete this research in a record one-year period by using tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom to conduct numerous sessions with both my supervisors and research participants to meet the tight deadlines, says Constandious.
“The pressure of the pandemic presented opportunities that had not been tested before which worked well and have in turn motivated my supervisors to propose the same online supervision and guidance model for future research students.
Most importantly, since this research was conducted at PathCare (the organisation I work for), implementation of the research findings has already started, to ensure compliance with POPIA by 30 June 2021” says Constandious.
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