Waitemata clinicians get snapshot of inpatient data

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Picture: A screenshot of patient information on Inpatient Snapshot.

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

An inhouse-developed system displaying a snapshot of patient data is being accessed more than 3,000 times a day by Waitemata DHB clinicians.

Waitemata DHB pharmacist and IS clinical change manager David Ryan says the organisation’s best-of-breed approach to building an electronic medical record means there are a lot of electronic systems in use.

“The problem is having to click into a lot of systems and each takes 5–6 seconds, which was very frustrating,” he explains.

Clinicians were asking for a summary of the relevant patient data in real time, but the underlying systems were not fast enough to do that.

Since late 2017, Ryan has worked with a developer to create Inpatient Snapshot, which was initially deployed with information from the e-Vitals and e-Prescribing systems.

Presented as a new icon in the board’s Orion Concerto portal, it had 250 accesses the first day and is now accessed 3,000 times a day by clinicians working across the DHB.

An agile development method means new features are constantly being introduced, and it now presents a snapshot of patient information, including internal referrals, procedures, reports, community dispensing, patient history and alerts.

“We’ve had about 15 iterative releases. Not a fortnight has gone by where we haven’t added some new data,” Ryan explains.

“Because we have optimised the queries, it’s faster, as we’re just querying the data that we need. If it’s not useful and we can’t make it load really quickly, then it’s not going on there.”

Since mid-December 2017, Inpatient Snapshot has been accessed more than 288,000 times by 2,600 unique users. Between 800-900 patients have their record viewed each day, taking one to one and a half seconds each time.

A survey of clinicians found it is saving six to 11 minutes of their time a day, which on conservative estimates totals more than 28,000 hours of clinicians’ time saved every year.

Inpatient Snapshot recently won the Waitemata DHB Health Excellence Award for Excellence in Clinical Care.

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