Christchurch completes Cortex roll-out

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Monday, 31 January 2022

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Cortex Canterbury DHB has finished rolling-out digital inpatient clinical notes and care coordination across the entire Christchurch Hospital campus, using Cortex.

CDHB e-clinical health lead Saxon Connor says a multidisciplinary team has been working to digitise the care coordination components of the inpatient records since 2018.

Maternity was the last of the Christchurch Hospital campus departments to go-live in December 2021 and now the whole site uses Sense Medical’s Cortex platform for clinical notes, tasks, orders and clinical communication.

Each week, more than 45,000 clinical notes are created. There are over 5000 active monthly users, who create around 21,000 tasks, 13,000 orders and 2.6 million views into the patient record every month.

Clinical nurse specialist Stacey Simpson says the implementation of Cortex was greatly accelerated in response to Covid-19 when what might have been a 3-year roll-out was condensed down to around six weeks.

The system was only deployed for nurses in three departments prior to the pandemic, but the need for digital notes meant the decision was swiftly made to deploy across the whole service, she says. This involved creating an online training module as many staff were not working on site due to the risk of infection.

“Cortex has improved our workflow, it hasn’t added work and it’s made our lives easier, that’s the biggest gain,” she explains.

Connor says the key issue they looked at when developing Cortex with Sense Medical was around what keeps patients in hospital and how could a digital record help speed up decision making.

“It was not a top-down deployment, it was very much about, how can we use Cortex in our workflows and teams?” he says.

It was also apparent from the start of the project that whatever they implemented for inpatient notes needed to be truly mobile.

Clinicians use iPhones or iPads to access the Cortex app to create and read clinical notes, send tasks and communicate with their teams.

Connor says that as a surgeon, being able to see what the nurses or allied health staff have written in a patient’s notes is “amazing”. He can also log in remotely to monitor patients from home and communicate with staff in the hospital.

Allied Health clinical informatics lead Charlene Tan-Smith says the digital solution is easy to use for a wide range of allied health professionals and she has been surprised about how many of them really love it.

“It’s for everyone from Allied Health Assistants to specialist dietitians and physios, and what they like is that they can read the note and understand what is going on with the patient and why they are needed,” she says.

Connor says the focus for the year ahead is on standardisation so more information can be shared automatically, reducing duplication.