Electronic clinical notes deployed across Waitematā DHB

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Picture: Screenshot of eProgress Notes

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

More than 100,000 electronic clinical notes have been created on an inhouse-developed solution being deployed across all inpatient beds at Waitematā District Health Board.

eProgress Notes uses predefined templates that users can personalise to make it quick and easy to enter free text as well as draw and edit images.

It has been steadily rolled out across North Shore Hospital and Waitakere Hospitals and is now in use on 400 beds.

Between 3000–4000 clinical notes are being written every day on the system, with 100,000 notes produced since it was first piloted in April 2019.

An extra hundred fixed PCs have been added to the wards and more computers on wheels have been ordered to cope with the increased demand for devices. The system is also available on iPads.

Pharmacist and information services clinical change manager David Ryan designed eProgress Notes with a small team of developers, after previously building and deploying Inpatient Snapshot in December 2017.

This provides a snapshot of patient information, including procedures, reports, medications and alerts, and is being accessed 17,000 times a day.

eProgress Notes is a ‘slide-out form’ on the system and allows users to import data from the snapshot, such as the latest patient observations, lab results and radiology reports.

Ryan says that while many parts of hospitals are now electronic, handwritten clinical progress notes have remained stubbornly paper based throughout the country.

Ryan and his small team set to work on defining the problem and basic requirements in January this year. Within 10 weeks they had a product to show clinicians that worked and fulfilled the basic functionality needed.

eProgress Notes was first piloted on a couple of beds in an older adults ward in April 2019. After one day clinicians wanted all patients to be added, so by day two all 33 beds on the ward were live.

The development team spent another four to five weeks refining the system, then rolled it out to another older adult ward in late May.

More than 400 beds are now live and all inpatient beds across the North Shore and Waitakere Hospitals will be using eProgress Notes within the next few months. The plan is to also implement it in outpatient services.

Ryan says the system is being implemented with no training because it fits with the current workflow and is easy to use.

“It’s been designed specifically for staff to document what they need to as quickly and safely as possible,” he tells eHealthNews.nz.

“We provide support for three to four days then after that the paper is gone pretty much.”

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

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