Connecting clinical portals will improve patient safety

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A project to connect the new Wellington region Clinical Portal with the Central region Clinical Portal will improve patient safety and could lead to clinicians being able to view patient information from anywhere around the country.

Te Whatu Ora Wairarapa has gone live with a new instance of Orion Health’s Clinical Portal eight, developed for the Wellington region, and Capital and Cost and Hutt Valley are due to go-live later in the year.

Chief clinical innovation officer Te Whatu Ora Wairarapa, Hutt Valley, Capital and Coast Steve Earnshaw says a ‘seamless clinical experience project’, will connect the new Wellington portal to the Central Region portal used by Whanganui, Hawke’s Bay and MidCentral districts, using a gateway that passes on authentication from one to the other.

The South Island, Northern and Midland regions are already using Clinical Portal eight to access patient information.

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“The advantage of moving to the current version of clinical portal is we will be on the same software as almost all of the other hospitals around the country which leaves the door open to connecting those different portals together,” Earnshaw says.

“This would have a big impact because we have siloed information around the country, so often the only way to get information from a different region or hospital is to contact them and get them to fax it through or send it by post.

“To be able to click in and look at the records for a patient that you are seeing in any of the other portals around the country would be really transformative and improve safety for patients, particularly those who move between areas,” he says.

The three Wellington hospital districts were using three of the oldest versions of Orion’s portal in the world and these did not share data with each other. The new portal is being rolled out in stages and running in parallel to the older version.

“It’s a gradual uptake, starting with a small group of super users. We started with about 10 percent of staff using it and that has grown to 25 percent,” Earnshaw says.

All clinical information has been pulled into the new portal and is now viewable across the three hospitals in the Wellington region.

“There has never been a consolidated view of information from all three hospitals, which was a significant clinical risk, so this is a massive step forwards for us in terms of patient safety,” he says.

“Patients move around a lot between the different hospitals in this region and things can be missed because notes were in a different hospital record, so we needed to bring all of those records together into one single view.”

The ‘seamless clinical experience project’ means users of the Wellington portal will be able to view the same patient’s record in the Central portal.

“We are hoping to go live with that later in the year, and after that we could potentially connect up all the districts around the country to provide read-only access into each other’s portals,” Earnshaw says.

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