Covid community testing goes paperless

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Five Auckland community testing centres (CTCs) have gone live with paperless collection and ordering of Covid-19 tests.

Whanau Ora has three permanent CTCs, which are now using the digital system, and two pop-up centres.

The paperless process has already been rolled out to the country’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine Facilities (MIQF) where staff who are collecting swabs use a new app to digitally link the test order, the guest, and the specimen through barcode scanning. 

Staff in the community log directly into the web version of Sysmex Eclair, search for the person’s National Health Index number using their name and address, then digitally link this to the swab taken.

Doug Healey, national operations director at The Whanau Ora Community Clinic, says the CTCs started using Eclair in March. 

The permanent sites in Northcote, Balmoral and Manukau allow foot traffic and vehicle traffic to turn up and be swabbed and pop-up sites can be set up anywhere within two hours.

“Having a digital network allows us to set up very quickly, in almost half the time it would take to set up a manual operation,” says Healey.
 
He says the digitals system runs smoothly with no paperwork or reports to complete. Staff at the site use a digital triage tool and a decision to test is shared to Eclair to create a swab order.

Eclair then allows a nurse to capture the swab via digital scan and the system notifies the lab that a test has been done, as well as electronically ordering it. 

By verifying someone’s identity at the point when a test is taken, this saves around two mins per swab to register them in the lab and when labs are dealing with thousands of swabs a day, that quickly becomes a huge saving.

“The old systems created a ‘very’ noisy admin environment and Eclair works in silence. It is easy to use with no major issues since launching,” says Healey. 

Clinical lead for the Border Clinical Management System used in MIQF, Lara Hopley, says the whole process now takes just nine clicks for community testing staff to complete.

Ultimately, she would like to include an NHI barcode on a person’s Covid-19 tracer app to enable scanning and make the system even quicker.

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