Southern to go-live with regional patient information system and scanning solution

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

Southern to go-live with regional patient information system and scanning solution

Sunday, 18 June 2023

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Otago and Southland will join the South Island shared patient information system in October, improving flow across the region and establishing a single source of truth for patient care episodes.

Invercargill is also going live with a new scanning solution in July, followed by Dunedin.

Te Whatu Ora regional lead data and digital - Te Waipounamu, Kirsty Martin, says October will be an important milestone when the southern region moves away from standalone platforms to join the South Island Patient Information Care System (SIPICS).

Canterbury, South Canterbury and Nelson Marlborough are already live with the system and the West Coast is set to follow soon, creating a single system for the region.

Provided by Orion Health, SI PICS 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.

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“A shared system allows us to share and coordinate care across the South Island, as well as integrate with other clinical systems,” says Martin.

“The vision for the project has always been to enable regional planning through shared waitlist management and view of resources.”

She says the SIPICS will enhance the care experience for patients, whānau and clinical staff and provide a smooth journey for people who require specialist treatment anywhere in the South Island.

“It will also establish a single source of truth for patient care episodes, enabling integration with other clinical systems,” Martin explains.

“A regional solution helps us to standardise hospital processes across the region, offering a more consistent patient experience and less local process variation.”

She says having all districts using the same system will make data management easier as it enables the South Island to have a single data repository behind a regional application.

“This helps us to be more regional in our data storage and gives us functionality that may allow us to control wait lists on a regional basis in the future,” she says.

The Southern region is preparing for a move to the New Dunedin Hospital, due to open in 2025, which will be paper-lite.

Stage one of the data and digital solutions and infrastructure for the new hospital is the introduction of the Side Capture scanning solution, which will go-live in Invercargill in early July, followed by Dunedin.

Patrick Ng, chief digital officer for Te Whatu Ora Southern says the solution involves the scanning of new paper medical record content which is then made available to clinicians in their existing clinical portal, either through the existing document tree or in an electronic library, which is accessible from the portal.

“In conjunction with future digital forms project, this initiative will help enable Te Whatu Ora Southern to get to paper-lite as a foundational step towards a future of full digital solutions,” says Ng.

“As such, this is an interim measure that will eventually be superseded by a fully digital environment.”

The software solution is the same one as the one in use in Nelson Marlborough, but each implementation is a separate instance.

“A future roadmap is possible whereby the region could consume the product on an as-a-service basis. This will be evaluated in the future as regional and national direction for this solution is established,” he says.