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Connected Clinical
Information and
Patient Administration
System Improves
Care at Austin Health
“What it gives us is better continuity of patient care,” says
Paul Oppy, Director of Information Technology at Austin Health,
a leading teaching hospital and medical research centre in
Melbourne, Australia. He is speaking about the electronic patient
record (ePR), based on TrakCare, that Austin Health has
deployed. “We’ve connected every ward and clinic in the
hospital,” Oppy continues, “so no matter where a patient goes,
the doctors in that area can instantly see where that patient has
been within the hospital, and what his or her test results are.
“With the whole organisation
connected we are no longer so
dependent on paper patient records.” -Paul Oppy
Director of Information Technology,
Austin Health. |
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Austin Health is one of Australia’s leading teaching hospitals and medical research centres. With more than 850 beds, Austin treats over 77,000 inpatients and 490,000 outpatients and Allied Health patients a year from three sites: the Austin Hospital, the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital, and the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre. In its quest for better quality of care, Austin Health had a bold vision to create a truly paperless hospital environment. Providing a range of new clinical functionality to its clinicians while also replacing its outdated Patient Administration System (PAS) was a daunting task. And despite these major infrastructural changes, Austin Health still needed to maintain its operations – a bit like running a marathon while having open heart surgery.
Clearly, Austin Health could not replace their outmoded PAS
with a state-of-the-art, browser-based EPR overnight, especially
since it was necessary to continue treating patients while the
shift was made. That made TrakCare’s modular approach, which
allows Austin Health to reap immediate EPR benefits even as
they add more departments and more features, a perfect fit. The
TrakCare implementation was split into a number of phases to
allow realisation of the system benefits from early in the project.
This approach also greatly reduced risk and minimised any
negative impact that such broad change can bring.
In just six months, Austin Health launched the Emergency
Department module, followed by the Patient Master Index,
Medical Records, and Outpatient modules. TrakCare’s
unparalleled flexibility enabled the system to be tailored to
the requirements of staff and clinicians, who played a key role
in its design, resulting in strong and enthusiastic adoption.
TrakCare’s built-in integration capabilities allow data to be
readily integrated from a range of existing legacy applications,
utilising a variety of standard and proprietary formats, and
also help bring new systems online in a structured and lowrisk
manner. Today, the scope of the EPR project encompasses
admissions, discharges, and transfers (ADT), waiting list
management, diets and meal ordering, and results reporting
from radiology, pathology, and cardiology.
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