Hāwera Hospital live with Better Meds

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Thursday, 4 November 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Hawera Hospital Hāwera Hospital has gone live with the Better Meds electronic medication management solution, with Alcidion.

The pilot of the system started this week and will run until the end of January 2022 in the Emergency Department, inpatient wards and maternity unit.

Taranaki District Health Board is the first of the Te Manawa Taki (formerly Midland) region district health boards to go-live and this is the first deployment of the solution in the Southern Hemisphere.

The system provides an overview of patients’ medication records in a single, shared location and uses Alcidion’s Patientrack as the portal for access.

Alex Bray, head of the Emergency Department at Taranaki Base Hospital, says eMedicine systems like Better Meds are a key enabler in improving quality care and clinical outcomes.

“Empowering clinicians with this technology can reduce clinical risk, provide consistency in practice and a more collaborative and coordinated approach to patient care between healthcare providers throughout the health system. Overall, this supports the delivery of quality, patient-centred care,” he says.

Taranaki DHB is switching from Dedalus’ MedChart to the new electronic system.
The other Te Manawa Taki region DHBs (Hauora Tairāwhiti, Lakes, Bay of Plenty and Waikato) are still using paper-based medication management processes, but are also looking to make the move to Better Meds.

The system is a modern cloud-based platform with specific coding which interfaces to NZePS for prescriptions and NZ Formulary for decision support and is currently used in the UK and Europe.

Bray admits the biggest challenge has been the initial expectation that Better Meds is a fully developed, off-the-shelf solution that could simply be rolled off the truck and bolted onto existing systems.

“Rather it has been a work in progress to see what does and doesn’t work in New Zealand and learning how the New Zealand and UK medicines IT infrastructure differ,” he says.

“For me personally, that has meant having to reconsider what makes or breaks an eMedicines prescribing solution; what are the drivers of success; as well as what are the most important points for the software to capture in order to be successful.”
Training for Taranaki DHB staff who will be using the Better Meds system has received positive feedback. A train-the-trainer approach was taken and conducted primarily by the Taranaki DHB eMeds team.

Kate Quirke, Managing Director of Alcidion, commented, “We are very pleased to achieve this significant milestone with the Te Manawa Taki region in the pilot of Better Meds in New Zealand. We have worked successfully with Better to deploy integrated eMedicines Management capability in the UK and we look forward to the benefits and learnings that will now be realised in New Zealand”.

Learn more about the deployment of Better Meds at Taranaki DHB in this eHealthTV webinar on-demand.