South Island Patient Information Care System live across rural Canterbury

Return to eHealthNews.nz home page

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Picture: Deborah Chestnut, Ward Clerk at Burwood Hospital, with SI PICS super-user Beverley Ballantine.

The region-wide patient administration and management system will include all five South Island DHBs by 2020 leading to a smoother process for patients moving between facilities.

The South Island Patient Information Care System has gone live at six rural health facilities across Canterbury.

The system, provided by Orion Health, will eventually become the region-wide solution for patient management and administration across the South Island’s five District Health Boards, which are all members of the South Island Alliance.

SI PICS programme manager at Canterbury DHB Dougal McKechnie says the regional project is on track to meet its aim of having all five DHBs using the system by 2020.

The patient information care system went live at the CDHB’s six rural health facilities on 9 March. These are Kaikoura, Waikari, Oxford, Darfield, Ellesmere and Akaroa.

Around 20–30 users were trained across the six sites.

While the rural units are relatively small, patients move between them and the tertiary centres in Christchurch, and this will be a much smoother process with a unified system, McKenchnie says.

SI PICS includes patient demographics; master patient index; appointment booking; waiting list management; patient transfers; record of patient activity; reporting, admission and discharges; and alerts and allergies. It is replacing eight Patient Administration Systems in place at the DHBs.

The programme’s website says that “it will connect health workers with coordinated, consistent access to a single region-wide solution, resulting in improved quality and safety systems, and a more streamlined patient journey from the community to the hospital and beyond”.

Nelson Marlborough DHB is due to go live with SI PICS by the end of April, and Christchurch Hospital, which includes a range of outpatient and community services, by the end of May. Ashburton Hospital will be the last remaining CDHB site to deploy in June.

McKechnie says the current plan is for West Coast DHB to be the third board to deploy the system, followed by South Canterbury DHB, with Southern DHB the last.

“It’s a regional programme so we work in a very collegial way. Depending on what task or activity needs to be done, we pull resource from wherever is most appropriate and operate as a virtual team,” says McKechnie.

SI PICS went live at Burwood Hospital in 2016 in a four-phase go-live, completed in under eight months.

General manager older persons, orthopaedics and rehabilitation at CDHB Dan Coward says lessons from the Burwood roll-out have been incorporated into planning, training and support for the rest of the DHBs.

Read more from Coward about the Burwood implementation of SI PICS in this feature story.

PROJECT CONTACT: To find out more about this project please contact Dougal McKechnie

Return to eHealthNews.nz home page