Millions of documents uploaded to Midland clinical portal

Millions of documents uploaded to Midland clinical portal

Date: 23 July 2018

More than 2.3 million documents have been uploaded to the Midland Clinical Portal since it went live in August 2017.

MCP provides a single point of access for clinical information from across the Midland region – Bay of Plenty, Lakes, Hauora Tairāwhiti, Taranaki and Waikato district health boards.

The first phase of the project was fully rolled out in February this year and provides a read-only view of real-time patient information via a shared instance of Orion Health’s Clinical Portal product visible across the five DHBs.

The MCP now has nearly 3,700 active users and covers more than 720,000 patients across the region and provides access to 2.3 million clinical documents.

eSPACE is delivering the portal project. Programme director David Page says the top six documents being looked at are discharge summaries, letters, interventions and procedures, referrals, assessments and progress notes.

The portal provides a patient timeline, which authorised users can click on to see a document or other information for that part of the patient’s journey.

The portal is accessible through each DHB’s existing clinical workstation, meaning a clinician involved in a patient’s care at one hospital can see the care they received at another.

Bay of Plenty DHB clinical director for informatics Matthew Valentine says there is a large flow of patients around the region.

“Patients are often more mobile than their health information, so it’s not always keeping up with them. Having a regional system reflects the way that the regional hospitals actually work,” explains Valentine.

“We now have had much quicker access to documents from Waikato to understand the tertiary level care that patients got while they were there. It’s really sped up our clinical understanding and provided better care and administrative processes to have such easy access to those documents.

“It’s a technical achievement to get these five DHBs into a single repository, and a political achievement as well, that we could work together to do so,” he says.

Valentine adds that moving to a single set of servers and a single instance of Orion’s Clinical Portal also means the cost of maintenance and support for all the DHBs’ different systems can be used more efficiently to “move the whole region forward”.

Page says the next step will be transitioning each of the DHBs off their existing clinical workstations on to the Midland Clinical Portal, which will allow staff to write directly into the shared system.

This transition is due to start in mid-2019 and the exact order is yet to be determined, but Bay of Plenty, Lakes and Hauora Tairāwhiti DHBs are likely to go first.

Taranaki DHB is already using an instance of Orion as its clinical workstation, Waikato, Lakes and Hauora Tairāwhiti DHBs are using Health Views and Bay of Plenty is using a homegrown system.

As the new portal’s functionality increases, these legacy systems will eventually be switched off.

Page says access to the portal will also be extended to community providers, such as GPs, via existing protocols between health professionals and DHBs, and through a series of API links with other system providers.

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