St Vincent's Hospital
St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne (St Vincent's) is a leading Australian hospital and is part of the largest non-government, not-for-profit health care provider - the Sisters of Charity Health Service. St Vincent's provides adult medical, surgical and mental health services and a range of community and outreach services. The hospital is a major teaching, research and tertiary referral centre.
The hospital, which includes a $160 million inpatient building, has approximately 400 beds treating over 30,000 in-patients per year. The Hospital is part of St. Vincent’s Health – which also operates St. George’s Health Service and Caritas Christi Hospice. St Vincent’s has been using IBA Health’s financial solution, for over 10 years.
St Vincent’s realised that in order to provide the highest standards of care and service in the future, it needed to replace and expand on its ageing Patient Administration System (PAS). In line with its innovative and progressive approach to patient care and management, St Vincent’s selected IBA Health’s PAS - a web based solution for patient administration - to support this world-class healthcare facility.
ST VINCENT’S HOSPITAL – PAS
- Maximises hospital utilisation
- Improves cashflow processes
- Populates the EHR
- Reduces training time significantly
The Challenge
St Vincent’s Hospital offers an extensive range of specialist medical and surgical services. The Hospital includes 10 General Theatres and a Day Surgery Unit together, servicing up to 70 patients per day.
Administrative staff, nurses and doctors required a solution that was secure and fully integrated across the organisation, including inpatients, all theatres, both general and day surgery, the emergency department, out-patients and allied health.
Senior management at St Vincent’s appreciated the potential challenges associated with providing timely and accurate information to enable streamlined and coordinated patient care across such a large and complex healthcare enterprise.
“We had been running a 15 year old legacy information technology system and support for this was decreasing. It wasn’t going to be adequate as a platform for the future. We needed to move to a web-based platform for patient administration that would enable the sharing of patient information between the various business units of the health service. We also needed a solution that would readily integrate with future clinical information systems,” said Peter Whatley, PAS Project Manager St Vincent’s Health.
The IBA Health Solution
St Vincent’s implemented the following modules - Inpatients, Patient Master Index (PMI), Waiting List, Emergency, Theatre Management, Outpatients, Allied Health, Patient Billing, Medical Records Management, Casemix Income Analysis System and Government & Agency Reporting. These modules can transfer data directly to other third party applications via any HL7 messaging engine.
“The executive team at St Vincent’s made a strategic decision to select a web based solution in order to ensure prospective easy integration of St George’s Health Service and Caritas Christi Hospice. The solution was technologically more streamlined and configurable than the alternatives, enabling a lower cost implementation. Being an Australian company was an important factor, as was the easy to use, flexible internet browser to view patient records” said Jenny O’Brien, Manager Information Services.
A collaborative relationship has existed throughout the project between IBA Health and the St Vincent’s Project team under the direction of Peter Whatley. Ready access to highly skilled professionals at IBA Health such as business analysts with worldwide health and IT experience and specially trained programmers meant that the inevitable fine-tuning and changes that arose were promptly addressed.
“Having this direct communication between the requester and programmer allowed for faster and more responsive clarification and resolution of issues,” said Mr Whatley.
ST VINCENT’S HOSPITAL - SNAPSHOT
- 10 General Theatres and a Day Surgery Unit
- 30 000+ In Patient admissions
- 53 000+ Out Patient attendances
- 1700 workstations
- 600 users daily.
Benefits to the Hospital
Saves Time & Improves Patient Care
“With IBA Health’s PAS vital administrative, patient and billing information is exchanged seamlessly in real time between facilities and departments, streamlining patient care and enhancing workflow” said Meaghan Willis, PAS Business Manager.
The web-based solution gives doctors, nurses, allied health and administrative staff fast and easy electronic access to the information they need to manage patients through their entire stay in hospital. Staff and families have up to the minute information on the patient’s location and condition within the hospital, whether they are in outpatients, emergency, pre-theatre, recovery or moved to a different bed or ward.
This maximises efficiencies in ward, bed and theatre utilisation in real time and therefore contributes to lowering the hospital’s operating costs. It also enhances patient satisfaction.
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Improves Cashflow
Australia’s leading billing system, IBA Health’s Patient Billing module has streamlined the automated private practice billing process. . Being fully integrated with the PAS, information passes seamlessly from one system to another eliminating the need to re-key information.
It has reduced the time associated with analysing patient billing information as well as reducing human error, enabling more accurate patient billing. Invoicing occurs simply as a by-product of information captured when a patient is discharged.
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Populating the EHR
A key benefit has been the increase in the use of the system by nurses and doctors. With the browser based system, significantly more staff including nurses and doctors can now perform an extensive range of functions.
This has been possible because of IBA Health’s user friendly, familiar web based screens.
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Reduces Training Time
The time required to train new staff to use the application is minimal as most are already familiar with the use of a browser and the system is highly intuitive.“New nurses learn to use the system after only one session as it is self explanatory. This allows new staff to concentrate on managing patient care rather than on IT” said Georgie Christian, Associate Nurse Unit Manager.
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Improves Reporting
All reports (standard and custom) were previously generated in Medisys. IBA Health’s PAS provides 83 standard and statistical reports. Custom reports (Cyberscience) are developed on site by a Cyberscience consultant according to the hospitals unique requirements. Changing to a new system has allowed the implementation of improved business processes, which has seen a reduction in the total number of custom reports from approximately 400 to 143.
The Future
IBA Health’s PAS is currently in use at the Fitzroy campus with plans for its roll out across Caritas Christi and St Georges Health. There are multiple options available to healthcare organisations that implement our PAS. The future for St Vincent’s Hospital may involve implementation of some of the additional modules that are available.