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Aachen (LORENZO) | Salford Royal - NPfIT | Birmingham City (i.PM) | Luton & Dunstable (i.PM) | Worcestershire (i.PM) | Southern Health (i.PM) | Hunter Area Health (i.PM) | Barwon Health (i.PM) | Salford Royal (i.CM) | Wirral Health (HealthViews) | Leicestershire (i.Lab) | John Radcliffe (i.Lab TP) | Bradford (i.Pharmacy)
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Hunter Area Health Service
To run an effective healthcare organisation, healthcare professionals need to access patient information directly at the point of care.
Patient information doesn’t restrict itself to one particular hospital or clinic. It needs to flow throughout an organisation, to involve everyone with a right and a need to know in care delivery.
The Hunter Area Health Service (HAHS), which has sixteen public hospitals and one contracted public hospital spread over a wide geographical area, is using the latest iSOFT information technology to fully integrate patient services. i.Patient Manager extends access to critical patient care information across multiple campuses and integrates into the full continuum of care.
The partnership
Hunter Area Health Service selected healthcare software specialist iSOFT to help achieve their objective of implementing a common patient administration system across the entire health service, improving the access to patient information and ultimately improving patient care.
iSOFT’s i.Patient Manager (i.PM) solution has been specifically chosen to provide an enterprise wide solution which can be accessed from any location and at any time by authorised staff. i.PM allows Hunter Health to replace existing systems and further integrate patient information. i.PM equips Hunter Health with a world class patient administration solution with improved functionality and flexibility based on a leading edge technology platform.
The project
The Hunter Health project team, lead by Warren Laurence, decided on an aggressive phased implementation.
Phase 1 saw 12 hospitals go-live with core i.PM functionality. The second phase of implementation involved the rollout of i.PM Outpatient Management to the initial 12 sites. The third phase of implementation included the rollout to the upper Hunter region, assisting the more remote hospitals to be truly integrated within the Area Health Services. The final phase involved the rollout of core i.PM and i.PM Outpatient Management at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital in Newcastle. The extensive implementation at Hunter Health was delivered under budget and ahead of schedule.
i.Patient Manager has enabled Hunter Health to replace a number of disparate systems throughout the area, facilitating access to patient information via a single system. This single solution approach is capable of accessing all 1.2 million patient records from the legacy systems, which were migrated to i.PM. The migration of data ensures continued access to existing information and allows Hunter Health to focus on improvement of resource allocation, service delivery and internal processes.
i.Patient Manager also offers the performance required to sustain a high number of concurrent users accessing the system, which was previously not possible.
The on-going partnership also saw a major upgrade to i.PM 1.84, providing several enhancements; including the multi-campus functionality. This additional functionality supports the improvement to security, whereby patient information can be controlled at an area, facility or user level. Whilst i.PM provides for patient management across the area, multi-campus functionality allows information and site-specific business practise to be supported at facility level as required. Several other enhancements were introduced with this upgrade to support business management functions and state-wide reporting requirements.
HAHS recently implemented i.PM Electronic Discharge (ED) and i.PM Theatre modules to the busy clinical areas of the John Hunter Hospital (JHH). This provides access to patient information for an extra 300 users, including clinical staff at JHH alone. ED & Theatre users can now retrieve patient information and history covering approximately 4000 ED attendances per month & 1000 surgical procedures per month. The transition of electronic data entry to i.PM enables HAHS to retire existing disparate systems and continue to seamlessly rollout i.PM ED and Theatres across the area. This further improves the availability and streamlining of patient information across the area, facilitating the flow of patient information across the continuum of care.
Leading edge technology
The Hunter Health i.PM implementation is the largest Australian implementation of a Microsoft SQL server in a healthcare environment. With an implementation of this scale, a sophisticated infrastructure has been created to guarantee maximum performance for users and to ensure access and security is optimised.
i.Patient Manager is a state of the art application both in terms of business concepts and utilising the considerable power and network capabilities of advanced Microsoft technology. The entire application environment has been developed using Microsoft technology thereby allowing iSOFT and Hunter Health to take full advantage of leading edge, industrial strength technology development.
The i.Patient Manager benefits – fast, accurate patient information
Real benefits for clinical and administration staff have come from using i.PM, such as streamlined sharing of information improving patient care. i.PM also provides enhanced functionality in relation to supporting all types of patient episodes and improved accuracy of reporting to the Department of Health has also been achieved.
The future
iSOFT and Hunter Health are continuing their partnership to further integrate patient information at the point of care including the continued rollout of i.PM ED and Theatre to the remaining HAHS sites. i.PM will also provide the critical foundation for the NSW Point of Care Clinical Projects.
“In partnership with iSOFT we have been able to lay the foundations for an integrated patient management system across our organisation. We are well positioned for our organisations future strategic IT developments allowing us to deliver real benefits to our patients and staff”
Warren Laurence
Project Director
Hunter Area Health Service
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