‘One-stop-shop’ for clinical documents and tasks improves results sign-off

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Picture:  Counties Manukau Health’s health informatics and medical administration fellow Brian Yow presenting at the HiNZ Conference 2019.

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Counties Manukau and Waitematā District Health Boards have a mandatory clinician inbox homepage in their clinical portal to improve sign-off of results and other tasks.

Lara Hopley, WDHB clinical advisor for digital innovation and Brian Yow,  CMH health informatics and medical administration fellow, presented on the Northern Region’s Clinical Portal operating model at the HiNZ Conference 2019 in Hamilton last November.

The regional team of DHB, health Alliance and vendors, deliver fortnightly sprints to enhance the portal and assesses potential changes using an agile prioritising matrix, looking at things such as clinical benefit, patient safety and operational efficiency.

The team created a mandatory homepage with a ‘one-stop-shop’ for outstanding tasks, which is the first thing clinicians see when they log-in.

These include unaccepted results, highlighting critically important ones, unapproved letters and declined eReferrals. As tasks become more urgent, they turn red.

Hopley said this made the list of tasks easier to access and more visible and transparent for clinicians. The change was implemented through a quality improvement initiative from the Chief Medical Officers and Clinical Directors.

Yow said the previous way of doing things, “was really click heavy and mentally overburdening for the clinician to go into all the systems and find their queue of unexpected results or list of letters to sign off".

A pilot of the new homepage for clinical laboratory results in select specialities showed a significant improvement in just 35 days.

“We were initially cautious putting this in, as it is a change to clinical workflow, but luckily, the results speak for themselves,” Yow said.

“We just turned it on and the clinicians saw the inbox and started using it. The best type of system should be intuitive to the user and not require a manual.”

The DHB has more than 10,000 users of the clinical portal and the sprint methodology means that every two weeks something changes.

“We want to implement virtuous cycles, making it easy to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing.” Hopley said.

Every sprint now includes a picture with a quick tip on the login page highlighting the change.

Watch the Regional Clinical Portal: Forming, Storming, Norming and now Performing, and how Agile helped presentation by Brian Yow and Lara Hopley this article relates to by logging into the eHTV Webcast Library at http://hinz-archive.gigtv.co.nz (you must be a HiNZ member to access. Not a member? Join now). 

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

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