Half of hospitals live with eMeds

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

Around half of New Zealand's hospitals are live with electronic medication management for inpatient prescribing and the whole of Te Waipounamu South Island is due to be using a digital system within this financial year.

Health New Zealand | Te Whatu Ora is working through a staged rollout of MedChart via its National eMedicines Programme.

Katie Davis, product manager diagnostics and medicines, Health NZ presented on the programme at a HiNZ webinar on September 23 where she said the programme’s vision is that “medicines are managed safely and consistently for every person in every care setting in New Zealand.

“That comes down to having a complete and reliable view of someone's medicines at the point of prescribing and administration, having a connected record that follows the person across various care settings, hospital, community, primary care, having timely information flowing back to support decision support, quality improvement, equity, and reporting, and having a continuous improvement loop, so we know that the systems will fit clinical workflows and align to medication safety,” Davis explained.

Just over half of the country's hospitals are still using paper for inpatient prescribing and clinical informatics director Bryan Simpson said that comes with risks. 

"Avoidable medication harm on paper can be common and it can be severe,” he said.
MedChart is already live at Waitematā, Counties Manukau, Taranaki and MidCentral.

In the South Island there are two instances: one shared between Canterbury and West Coast and another covering South Canterbury and Southern. Nelson Marlborough will join the Canterbury West Coast instance within the current financial year. 

Davis described getting the whole of South Island region onto a digital system as "a really big win."

The latest version of MedChart is live in MidCentral and integrates with the New Zealand e-Prescription Service, enabling electronic discharge prescriptions to be sent directly from the system. It also connects with the Medicines Data Repository for medicines reconciliation.

Davis said the programme's goal is to roll this version out more widely across the country, with Whanganui due to join MidCentral within the year.

A national ePharmacy upgrade, covering the hospital dispensing system used in nearly all New Zealand hospitals, is also underway and is a key part of the upgrade work with the programme moving to sub-regional or regional instances where possible.

Simpson said that running in parallel with the system implementation is work to reconcile the clinical content across seven existing MedChart instances, each with its own configurations, quick lists, dose range rules, and alert wording. 

He said there is significant variation nationally with clinical libraries ranging from around 650 entries at one site to around 4,000 at another. 

The goal is to develop a national baseline configuration, copied into each regional instance, with regional additions permitted only by exception. 

He said clinician buy-in is increasing and is one of the most significant factors in the programme's progress. 

"Clinicians pull these systems now rather than having them pushed, and it changes our job from persuading people to designing well and responding quickly to what they need,” he said.

Peter Bennett, pre-sales specialist, medication management, Dedalus APAC said moving to electronic medication management impacts clinician efficiency as their time is not taken up with finding charts, deciphering handwriting, transcribing medications, duplicating documentation and reconciling information across systems

Improved medication safety is another significant benefit as a digital system creates a single source of truth and introduces multiple safety checkpoints throughout the medication journey.

"One of the big pluses of MedChart is that every doctor, nurse, and pharmacist is looking at the same information in one place," Bennett said.

"The greatest value comes when all the elements of the medication management process - prescribing, pharmacy verification, dispensing, administration, meds reconciliation, and discharge planning - are connected as a single workflow rather than operating as separate processes.”

If you would like to provide feedback on this news story, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

You’ve read this article for free, but good journalism takes time and resource to produce. Please consider supporting eHealthNews by becoming a member of HiNZ, for just $17 a month.

Read more Clinical Software news

Return to eHealthNews.nz home page