eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

3 Wellington DHBs to implement single clinical portal

Sunday, 12 September 2021  

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Capital & Coast, Hutt Valley and Wairarapa DHBs will upgrade to a single instance of Orion Health’s Concerto Portal and will integrate with the Central Region’s portal to share patient information.

The regional portal had previously been considered a ‘core application’ that all six of the region’s DHBs would adopt, but the three Wellington DHBs have decided to implement their own version.

Acting chief digital officer at 3DHB Steve Earnshaw says the Wellington DHBs are using three of the oldest versions of Concerto in the world and these do not share data with each other.

“We have patients move between DHBs very frequently and patient information is siloed across the portals at the moment,” Earnshaw explains.

“We are upgrading these three into a single consolidated up-to-date version of the portal and establishing data sharing with the rest of the region.”

He says the 3DHBs, particularly Capital & Coast, did not want to lose the inhouse functionality they have developed over many years by moving to the regional version.

While some regional portals allow DHBs to have different views and sets of functions, the central region portal is not set up that way.

“It would have been a step backwards to move to the regional version in terms of things like referral management and clinical whiteboards,” Earnshaw tells eHealthNews.

“This way we achieve the same result in terms of sharing patient information, but we are able to keep that functionality locally.”

The business case has been approved by the Ministers or Health and Finance and work is underway, with Wairarapa currently planned as the first of the DHBs to go-live towards the end of next year.

Hawke’s Bay, MidCentral and Whanganui DHBs are already live with the regional Concerto portal.

Earnshaw says the work done to connect the two instances of the portal could be replicated nationally, to allow other regions to connect up and share information as all areas of New Zealand are using the Concerto product.

This would be particularly useful for the Wellington region as it takes a lot of patients from Nelson Marlborough and gets a number of patients returning from Auckland.

“There’s a lot of potential and that’s quite exciting as exchanging information is really key to patient safety,” he says.

 

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


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