Hauora Tairāwhiti live with regional clinical portal

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Hauora Tairāwhiti live with regional clinical portal

Wednesday, 31 March 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Hauora Tairāwhiti DHB is live with the interactive Midland Clinical Portal (MCP), giving it a modern base on which to build other digital clinical systems, the DHB’s chief executive says.

The DHB was scheduled to implement the portal last September, but this was delayed due to Covid-19 and it ultimately went live on March 26, 2021.

The MCP replaces the DHB’s legacy system, called Health Views, that was no longer supported.

“That was our first and most primary need to switch to a more modern product,” DHB chief executive Jim Green tells eHealthNews.nz

“It’s a good base point for us to keep moving forward in terms of development of our systems, so we can deploy eMeds management and transfer of care on a modern base.

“Then it drives through to better utilisation of the information that we have to enable clinicians to make decisions and get better patient outcomes.

“This enables us to carry on with the challenge to eliminate paper and make things much more shareable and understandable.”

The MCP first went live in July 2017, providing a read-only view of real-time patient information via a shared instance of Orion Health’s clinical portal product visible across the five Midland region DHBs – Bay of Plenty, Lakes, Hauora Tairāwhiti, Taranaki and Waikato.

Bay of Plenty became the first of the region’s DHBs to implement the new interactive portal on October 13 2020.

Green said staff from Orion Health, shared services provider HealthShare and Bay of Plenty DHB were all on site at Tairāwhiti to assist with the go-live.

“It’s really demonstrated the value of working together as DHBs, as we share the portal and the knowledge and support around it and we will be paying that forward when Lakes DHB goes live later this year,” he says.

Green says there will be “big step up” in terms of functionality when Lakes goes live as the DHBs speed up the development pathway for the portal.

He and the implementation team were very pleased with the go-live and the high level of buy-in from clinicians to use the new system.

“It has gone better than expected with fewer issues than we thought there might be. A really important factor has been the joined up working between our clinical staff and information services staff supporting the transition on the floor,” says Green.

He describes it as, “quite a logistical exercise” to get to the point of being able to implement the portal.

“Due to Covid it’s been a stop-start process, so we had to get back on track, identify all the staff who needed to be trained and provide different options for them to do that,” he says.