Regional Approach on Digital Growth Charts a Success

26 August 2019

More than 200,000 digital growth charts have been created since the Northern Region DHBs and their shared ICT services partner healthAlliance collaboratively rolled out eGrowth Charts.

Auckland DHB was the first to go live in September last year, followed by Waitemata DHB, Counties Manukau Health and more recently Northland DHB.

Traditionally paediatricians, nurses, midwives, dieticians and other health professionals would each have their own handwritten charts or would use older electronic charts that were not widely available.

Eclair’s eGrowth Charts has replaced this paper-based charting system, allowing clinicians to electronically capture and record growth data and parameters for a range of patient scenarios, for example the monitoring of pre-term infants.

Digitising this data has resulted in increased consistency and accuracy of values and provided automatic calculations of key indicators such as BMI, height velocity and z-Scores. The clear, precise graphics also help clinicians, patients and families visualise and more easily understand the information presented.

Greg Williams, Paediatrician at Starship Child Health, said the new eGrowth charts have been a huge technological leap forward in monitoring the growth of patients.

"They are easy to access and use, are available across the hospital and community care team, and are now regional."

"The proof is in the uptake – we are using Eclair eGrowth charts way more than the previous versions, and this is providing us with much better information to support clinical care,” says Greg.

Karl Cole, healthAlliance's Chief Clinical Information Officer, said the main advantage of eGrowth Charts is the integration of patient records.

"This means all four Northern DHBs can now see the same, up-to-date data wherever the patient goes.”

Primary care clinicians can view the eGrowth charts for their patients via TestSafe, the region's clinical data repository system for laboratory and radiology results and reports, medications, discharge summaries, clinical documents and other patient data. eGrowth charts can also convert it to PDF format for printing so that copies can be given to patients and their families or emailed to other healthcare providers.

ENDS

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