Waitematā live with Centric electronic whiteboard

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Hear David Ryan present on Centric Whiteboard at Digital Health Week 2021 in Wellington November 29 - Dec 1. Register now.

Waitematā DHB’s two Emergency Departments are using a new inhouse-developed electronic whiteboard solution designed around the clinicians’ user experience.

The Centric whiteboard lists all the patients in the ED and allows clinicians to view, at a glance, the status of lab or radiology requests and newly prescribed medications, as well as easily link into almost every other clinical system.

Users can configure the list according to their clinical need and expand the basic view for a patient to see the latest observations and early warning score.

The whiteboard also enables communication around what a patient needs by allowing users to add notes.

Willem Landman, clinical director emergency medicine at Waitematā DHB, says the system is intuitive and did not require training before implementation in May 2021.

“The biggest benefit is tying in a whole load of different systems and unifying them into something the user can access from a single place. This saves time because we don’t need to do things multiple times or repeat information multiple times,” he says.

“It also allows us to look at where spaces are in the department and how to direct traffic through the department.

Landman says the project is unique due to the responsiveness of the development team, with feedback received and enhancements rolled-out within days of it going live.

“Within the first few weeks they rapidly developed it into the application we all use today,” Landman says.

“It’s improved the running of the ED and it’s exciting because it’s continually improving so the process is very nimble and agile, which is not something I would normally associate with IT projects within health.”

Waitematā DHB information systems clinical change manager David Ryan says the Centric suite of products started with the Centric Notes application and inpatient snapshot, but has now broadened beyond these with the use of four core services; Authenticator, Identity, Encounters and Launcher.

Authenticator integrates with active directory and manages access to all Centric applications. Identity stores who a person is, where they work and what their role is for the current shift.

Encounters groups episodes of care together and the Launcher securely takes a user in to any of the other applications in patient context.

“We realised that to ensure we weren’t consumed by maintenance, we needed to apply Service Oriented Architecture, and build components once, that could be re-used many times,” Ryan explains.

“Every application we build now hangs off this infrastructure.”

Ryan tells eHealthNews.nz the ED workflow is very fast moving, so ensuring the design team had intimate knowledge of the processes, and getting regular feedback from users was key.

In the future, the aim is to display any list of patients within the product, such as; an outpatient clinic, patients admitted under an inpatient team, or even a personal worklist a user has curated, making it a much more powerful tool.

Three inhouse developers develop the system alongside four designers, who are all practicing clinicians.

Hear David Ryan present on Centric Whiteboard at Digital Health Week 2021 in Wellington November 29 - Dec 1. Register now.

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

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