UnitingCare Health in Queensland executive director Richard Royle said the 100-bed St Stephen’s hospital at Hervey Bay, 300km north of Brisbane, would open in early October and integrate with the federal government’s personally controlled electronic health record — something he knows intimately.
Mr Royle recently chaired the Coalition government’s review of the PCEHR system.
The report has not been made public.
Medical imaging, X-ray equipment, insulin pumps and renal dialysis machines are among items connected to the software system. Data from anaesthetic machines and blood pressure machines is automatically recorded into the patient’s record.
“One of the benefits of this is there are no transcription errors,” he said.
Mr Royle said the hospital had adopted global healthcare corporation Cerner’s software system to run the hospital.
The hospital would be connected by WiFi and 310km of fibre optic cable.
“That’s as much fibre-optic cable as there is to drive from Hervey Bay to Brisbane,” he said.
Patients’ medical records would be available to approved staff via desktop computers, smartphone and tablets. They will be able to review pathology results, X-rays and all diagnostic test results electronically.
Mr Royle said that the hospital would have Australia’s first closed-loop electronic medication system where doctors could order drugs electronically without writing scripts.
The electronic order goes to the hospital pharmacist, who prepares the drug, which is put into a single-dose barcoded blister pack. These are put in an electronic medication dispensing cabinet in the ward.
This process, which drastically reduced medication errors, was common in the US but this was the first time it was used in Australia, Mr Royle said.
Patients’ computers would be used for a variety of purposes. They could view their test results, Skype friends and family and there would be educational videos. “You can watch that video in your bed and the record will note that you have watched that video,” Mr Royle said.
Patients would be tracked and when a loved one came to visit they could track where a patient was in the hospital, he said.
An electronic meal-ordering system would allow patients to order food and drinks from their bedsides within the parameter of their allowed diet. Information about what they ate also was stored in electronic records.
Staff and doctors would have ID badges linked to electronic records, so when a doctor walked in or out of a patient’s room it would go on the record.
Mr Royle said manufacturers had ensured the software in their equipment talked to the major providers’ healthcare.
Cerner was one of the major software providers so all the equipment that the hospital was buying talked to Cerner software, he said. Cerner had been UnitingCare’s software provider since 1999 and the hospital would be linked to Cerner’s remote hosting mainframes.
He said Cerner had contracts in Queensland, NSW and Victoria to provide IT services into public hospitals.
They would be able to talk to the systems at St Stephens.
He ran five not-for-profit hospitals totalling about 1000 beds and UnitingCare would look at retrofitting parts of the system in them progressively.
Given the Hervey Bay area is prone to cyclones, there were two generators — a backup of a backup that could run the entire hospital for 72 hours. System data was backed up onto PCs at the hospital every two hours, he said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Chris Griffith
Quelle/Source: The Australian, 29.04.2014
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