MDM solution enables South Island cancer meetings

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

All South Island cancer services are live with a multidisciplinary meeting (MDM) system developed at Southern DHB, which now supports around 90 meetings per month.

The electronic MDM system has been in use in Southern DHB since 2013 where it was developed by director of digital transformation Lance Elder and clinicians. It was rolled out across the South Island via the Health Connect South clinical portal from 2017.

MDMs bring together a range of specialists involved in diagnosing and treating cancer to discuss patients and make treatment or care plan recommendations.

Janfrey Doak, project manager at Te Aho o Te Kahu Cancer Control Agency, says the arrival of Covid-19 significantly increased the focus on working remotely and using available electronic tools and systems, which further demonstrated the value in the regional platform for all 15 cancer tumor streams.

The MDM solution allows clinicians to easily book their patients into a meeting for discussion and the creation of standardised forms ensures all relevant information is available at the meeting.

“Some of the common cancers, such as breast and colorectal, all use the same tumor specific proforma so we can aggregate their data and information in a dashboard,” she says.

“There is also real benefit in having common generic fields across all the cancer streams.”

Having a data extract from Southern DHB directly into the regional data warehouse supports the creation of dashboards by the CDHB decision support data analyst, and reports on things like diagnoses, ethnicity and demographics of cancer patients. Also, data analytics allows the efficiency of process, workloads and volumes of patients in the meeting to be monitored.

“We also wanted to bring together surgical data and long-term survival,” Doak says.

This involves pulling data from the scOPe theatre system and the national death registry to investigate issues like surgical outcomes and mortality

Canterbury DHB e-clinical health lead Saxon Connor says MDMs were previously often held in person without a virtual option to attend and people would dictate notes and letters, causing delays in getting the information back to the clinical notes.

An investment in technology to support virtual meetings has improved the experience for rural clinicians and enabled a greater range of people able to attend, as meetings are now usually hybrid.

“It’s really helped to get more people involved and reduced the barriers to presenting patients,” Connor explains.

“Ensuring that the right information is available at the meeting is important in order to make optimal clinical decisions.”

Picture: Janfrey Doak, project manager at Te Aho o Te Kahu Cancer Control Agency on screen speaking to Canterbury DHB e-clinical health lead Saxon Connor


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