Southern Cross joint-venture hospitals get EMR

Implementation is now underway so that by June all of Southern Cross’s joint-venture hospitals will have joined its wholly owned ones in using the same EMR.

Southern Cross Hospitals is extending the roll-out of its electronic medical record system to its joint-venture hospitals.

The private hospital group rolled out an EMR provided by Orion Health to its 10 wholly owned hospitals over a year to September 2017.

Southern Cross Hospitals national service manager Ian Malone says the first of the group’s joint-venture hospitals went live with the EMR in Nelson this March.

The second implementation was in Palmerston North in April, and hospitals in Tauranga and south-east Auckland will complete their go-lives over the coming months.

By the end of June, Southern Cross’s entire private hospital network will be covered by the same EMR. There are currently more than 1500 registered users of the system.

The hospitals have moved from paper to electronic processes for admission information/patient assessment, three risk assessments, surgical site surveillance and discharge summaries.

Clinicians are electronically updating patients’ health records at the bedside, and nurses and anaesthetic technicians are using hand-held tablet devices to do pre-theatre checks with patients.

Orion and Southern Cross Hospitals have also developed a ‘kitchen view’ of patient information, including where the patient is located, the diet they are on and any food allergies and preferences, as well as any changes to that.

Information is presented in real time on an electronic whiteboard in the kitchens, which also shows when patients are due to be admitted and discharged. This helps kitchen staff to plan.

Malone says the goal is for Southern Cross Hospitals to be able to share patient information digitally with the public health system, creating a shared health record that has all a patient’s previous hospital admissions, whether they were public or private.

A Southern Cross Hospitals/Orion Health joint development team is currently looking at giving doctors – who work at the hospitals but are not employed by the organisation – mobile access to the electronic patient information, says Malone. They are also looking at putting the hospitals’ care pathways online and using e-referrals.

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