Clinical and IT teams collaborate on mobile forms

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth 

More than 500 hours of development effort by both clinical and IT staff at Taranaki District Health Board has seen the release of 23 mobile forms over 10 months.

Taranaki DHB is expanding its use of mobile forms to its Child Physical Therapy unit after previously migrating 22 paper forms for its Public Health Nursing unit to a mobile solution.

ICT services manager Brett Griener says the recent work involved 544 hours of mobile form development effort and close collaboration between clinical and IT teams.

The DHB is using mobile software AMS, developed by the Kinross Group. The software encrypts all data securely in the cloud and all devices are password locked.

Griener says many of the form fields are automatically populated with data from the patient administration system, WebPAS from DXC Technologies, and information flows both ways between the forms and the PAS.

Taranaki staff are using a mixture of Android tablets, mostly of the Samsung Galaxy line. Forms are usually completed online, but can be completed offline and then submitted to the PAS when connectivity is available.

“It’s just a matter of the nurse or therapist using their mobile device to search for the child or adolescent by name to bring up their record,” says Greiner.

“Drop boxes, tick boxes and mandatory reminders also help speed up the collection of necessary data and improve data veracity.”

“With less time spent filling in paperwork, the nurses and therapists in both units are reporting that the quality of time with their patients, both in the community and during outpatient visits, has vastly improved.”

Greiner says staff can now email on the go, check calendars, make new appointments and use the devices’ GPS capability for location directions to new patient visits.

The collaboration between IT and clinical teams to create the mobile forms and develop improved workflows has also led to more timely peer review of patient data and care.

“Once the patient data has been entered, there are options to route certain information to relevant clinicians or doctors for approval,” he explains.

“Previously, a patient’s paper form would have to wait to be re-entered into a spreadsheet once a computer becomes available in the unit, and it would often be days before a clinician approved the treatment.”

Greiner says the financial savings are also significant.

“Our current strategy calls for more efficiency using IT clinical systems. Next on our roadmap is mobile device management to add an extra level of support for our people working on the go.”

Taranaki DHB has offered to demonstrate and share all the forms, processes and workflows to any other health provider interested in mobilising their data using the same mobile software platform.

“There was a significant amount of planning, collaborating, investigation and testing behind the scenes,” says Greiner.

“There’s no point reinventing the wheel when we can easily pass on our learnings and demonstrate the system to speed up migration time.”

Kinross director Ruth Bruce says, “It’s easy to see how capturing data only once can save time, reduce errors and provide a better service to the end patient or client.”

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