South Island Alliance tackles paper forms

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eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

The South Island Alliance is working to reduce the number of paper and electronic forms across the region by ensuring information is captured once and used multiple times within Health Connect South.

South Island Alliance regional programme manager Debbie Beesley says the project is about making the best use of clinicians’ time by moving from a “paper-based snapshot mindset” to one of “capture for ongoing utility”.

Health Connect South is the Orion Concerto regional clinical portal used by five district health boards in the South Island.

In April 2019, more than 15,000 unique users viewed around 170,000 patient records nearly 1.5 million times within the portal.

Beesley says the HCS team has paused work on digitising forms and putting them in HCS, while it assesses how to standardise forms and pull information from various systems to populate certain fields.

“We’re looking at the business processes and starting to ask the right questions, not just building forms for the sake of building forms, which is what we were doing in the past,” she explains.

This includes assessing the forms in terms of whether they are being used, how often and what their purpose is.

Beesley says it is also important to look at what is being done differently in places like Nelson compared to Dunedin and whether it can be standardised.

Canterbury DHB alone has more than 1,200 clinical and non-clinical paper forms and there can be up to 20 different versions of things like discharge summaries.

“We are trying to think in terms of pieces of information people need to know in whatever system they might be in – whether its ED, inpatient or outpatient – and trying to make sure that information is being re-presented rather than re-entered,” she says.

South Island Alliance information services SLA programme specialist Ryan Papps,says things like demographic information are important to check to ensure it is still correct, but should not need to be entered into systems multiple times.

There are also questions of form ownership, who should be able to look at them and whether the forms need to sit within the clinical portal or elsewhere.

“We need to keep things as standard as we can, without slowing things down. We need staff to get the benefit of other people’s activity, so you have some standard fields and minimise how much information needs to be added,” he says.

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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