Waitematā DHB’s leading the way in digitising and integrating clinical information

SECTOR UPDATE – Waitematā DHB

Waitematā DHB’s Centric Notes application has revolutionised the way hospital staff do their job. It has improved patient outcomes, streamlined workflow and is more sustainable.

Centric Notes, developed by Waitematā DHB’s Health Information Group, allows every interaction and review of patients to be documented electronically. The application integrates clinical information from radiology results, laboratory tests, clinical observations and medications to ensure references are quickly and accurately documented. Having all Clinical Progress Notes electronic has been a huge time saver. Plus, it’s designed with people who use it in mind.

“Digitisation is an exciting area of work within our DHB,” says Waitematā DHB CEO Dr Dale Bramley. “Continuously improving our electronic healthcare system will increase patient safety and achieve better outcomes for patients and staff.”

Prior to implementing the new system, the DHB was going through over 700,000 pieces of paper a year on clinical notes alone, which is the equivalent of almost 200 metres of stacked A4 pages. These notes all had to be kept somewhere and when needed they had to be retrieved from off-site.

“It took up a lot of time and it wasn’t easy to scan back through the notes to find the information you needed,” says David Ryan, IS Clinical Change Manager. “Now, all notes are available, all the time. The notes are searchable and legible.”

And it’s working! So far at Waitematā DHB, the application has been used across 1000 inpatient beds, 2.4 million distinct notes have been recorded and they have had 7.5million views. In fact, they have around 40,000 views per day which equals at least one person looking at the system every second!

Feedback from the frontline has been extremely positive. Notes are faster to type than write and when doctors are providing on-call clinical support they have first-hand access to what has been written. It’s been so successful that joint Chief Information Officer Stuart Bloomfield has initiated the rollout of Centric notes at Counties Manukau DHB.

“One of the most-requested IT solutions our Healthy Together Team receives from clinicians is to have electronic progress notes. The Centric eNotes platform enables CM Health to meet this need and could be considered a tipping point in terms of having more documentation electronically available than paper. Feedback from clinicians has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Stuart Bloomfield.