3DHB grows its clinical informatics team

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Informatics

Tuesday, 27 July 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Members of 3DHB’s clinical informatics team The success of 3DHB’s growing clinical informatics team means work is ‘flooding in’ as clinicians and ICT staff see the value they are adding to projects, says clinical informatics manager Karen Shaw.

Shaw is an emergency department nurse by background and works under chief clinical innovation officer Steve Earnshaw, who is an orthopaedic surgeon by training and currently acting chief digital officer at 3DHB.

Since October last year, the clinical informatics team has grown to five and is about to become six. Other members of the multidisciplinary team are community pharmacist, Annie Joe, consultant endocrinologist Brian Corley and physiotherapist Joanna Lee.

Shaw says the team is still relatively new, but since forming has had their workload increase significantly as, “people are seeing the value we're adding to projects, helping to get work to a place where it can be implemented”.

“At first, we were waiting for work to come in, but now the flood is such that we have a board for all the small, medium and large projects that we are involved in,” she explains.

A key component of the team’s work is looking at how to triage ICT requests, so those with the most clinical importance get done first.

She is also working with the central region DHB clinical informatics leads on having a standardised approach to business continuity planning with a clinical focus and developing a regional clinical informatics virtual team.

Shaw says there was previously a perception of technology projects being ‘done to’ clinical staff, rather than ‘with them’, with sometimes limited ongoing use of the technology delivered.

There is a difference between what people need and what they want and the clinical informaticians work to determine the problem before looking for a solution.

Shaw got involved in a clinical team’s request for a new technology tool and worked with them on a problem statement and process mapping, related to time taken to get notes dictated.

She says rather than going through the lengthy and costly procurement of a new tool, they are now testing the provision of access to an existing template for the clinicians.

“It’s a really good example of how what they thought they needed wasn't what they actually needed, and there turned out to be a much simpler solution,” she tells eHealthNews.nz.

Brian Corley recently worked on a project with allied health staff who wanted to understand issues around encrypting information and was able to develop a process they could follow that protects patient information and fits with their clinical workflow.

Shaw says the team’s core role is to be an advocate for the needs of clinicians and a translator between the language of clinicians and that of the ICT world.

“It’s about bringing together those two worlds and being the glue in the middle,” she says.

“I recently spoke to a clinician who said, ‘it's really nice to have someone who comes and listens to me and actually understands what I have to say, someone who puts what I need first’, and that's what we're trying really hard to do.”