South Canterbury next to roll-out SI PICS

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Thursday, 5 August 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

SI PICS The roll-out of the South Island Patient Information Care System (SI PICS) has been delayed, with South Canterbury DHB now due to go live in November 2021 and Southern DHB in 2023.

Provided by Orion Health, SI PICS will eventually become the region-wide solution for patient management and administration across the South Island’s five district health boards.

The system includes patient demographics, master patient index, appointment booking, waiting list management, patient transfers, records of patient activity, reporting, admission and discharges, and alerts and allergies.

Christchurch first went live with the SI PICS at Burwood Hospital in 2016 then implemented it across the DHB in 2018, the same year that it went live at Nelson Marlborough DHB.

West Coast and South Canterbury DHBs were due to implement by 2020, but South Canterbury is now due to go-live in November and West Coast DHB has not yet received financial approval for the deployment, with no go-live date set.

Southern DHB is planning to implement SI PICS in mid-2023 having received approval by the Ministers of Health and Finance.

Southern DHB executive director corporate services Nigel Trainor says the DHB will be replacing IPM, which has been its patient management system for the last ten years.

He says having a single shared instance of a patient administration system in the South island will support better planning and more sustainable and cost effective delivery of health services.

“The SI PICS enables a more streamlined patient journey through health services, from the community to the hospital and beyond and will enable care to be co-ordinated between different hospitals and care providers across the South Island,” Trainor says.

“Some of the benefits are having a single source of truth for patient episodes of care, acting as a foundational block to integrate with other clinical systems.”

These other systems include the Health Connect South clinical portal and HealthOne, which allows a South Island wide view of a shared patient record between primary and secondary care.

Trainor says the release cycle of the South Island system has allowed Southern DHB to respond to lessons learned through each implementation, “such as data quality, improving change management through allowing staff enough time to learn new systems and aligning processes, and other priorities such as the response to Covid-19”.

Gary Woodcock, South Canterbury DHB project manager – SI PICS, says the DHB is “well down the track” of implementing the SI PICS with a scheduled go-live date of November 2021. The regional system will replace its inhouse HPS system.

Training for the switch will include the use of super users to support the change process; step-by-step and quick reference sheets; video tutorials; classroom sessions; and one-2-one walk-in sessions.