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.”
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 Providing a range of new clinical functionality to its clinicians while also replacing its outdated Patient Administration System (PAS) was a daunting task.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.
“With the whole organisation
connected
we are no longer so
dependent on paper patient records.”
-- Paul Oppy
Director of Information Technology
Austin Health
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.
With TrakCare, Austin Health staff now have access to the right information at the right time in the right place, which is improving efficiency and increasing quality of care. Says Oppy, “With the whole organisation connected we are no longer so dependent on paper patient records. Patients don’t have to wait for records to physically be moved where they need to be. They get treated sooner, their doctors have fast access to all their test results, and the quality of care is improved.”
To learn more about TrakCare, please visit www.TrakHealth.com