Taranaki Base Hospital, NZ
The Taranaki District Health Board (DHB) provides a range of services to the local and wider community. Taranaki Base Hospital has 220 beds that service over 107,000 people. As well as being supported by the Hawera Hospital, which has 20 beds, Taranaki DHB is responsible for running five regional centers.
IBA Health has a long and successful association with Taranaki DHB. By working together, Taranaki was the first hospital in New Zealand to implement a Patient Administration System (PAS) accessible through an Intranet web site.
Based on the success of PAS, Taranaki implemented IBA’s Clinical suite in 1999. Jenny Murray, CIO Taranaki District Health Board says “Since the implementation of IBA Health Clinicals on the Web across Taranaki Health sites in October 1999 we have seen a dramatic rise in the use of information systems by clinicians directly involved in patient care.”
Benefits to Taranaki
The system provides Clinicians with fast access to the patient clinical record wherever they are throughout the hospital and health centres. “Many of our clinicians now comment that they rarely need to refer to the old medical notes – or wait for them to be located and delivered - as all the information they require is available at the click of a mouse” says Jenny.
The browser-based system is extremely easy to use. Once a user is familiar with navigating in a browser environment they are able to find information quickly and easily. The concept of a patient centric system has been used throughout the application ensuring that a user can access all relevant information about a patient from a single screen without having to negotiate complicated menus.
Views for doctors of their patient list or their clinical diary, showing both outpatient and theatre sessions and the ability to drill down from the list to the patient diagnostic results, is fast and simple. As a result, clinicians have access to a single view of the patient.
“Our clinical staff was no different to any others before we started implementing this system. They were reluctant to use the computers and saw them only as an administrative tool.”
Two years on, the hospital is able to collect and display much of the information which is required by their medical staff to make decisions about treatment including diagnostic results, clinical notes, baseline and neurological observations, discharge summaries, clinic notes, letters, emergency visits, and theatre notes.
As a result of introducing the system, there was a corresponding increase in demand for access points. All outpatient clinics have PCs, while the hospital has wireless laptops in wards that are taken on the ward rounds and used extensively by the clinical staff at the Point of Care.
“In making clinicians increasingly more reliant on technology to be able to perform their day to day work we must also ensure that the systems we chose are reliable and available. We have found the IBA Health system to be extremely reliable with no unscheduled outages in the last six months.”
Taranaki DHB has gained a reputation for it’s high quality information systems. We have used our advances in health information systems in marketing our organisation as a great place to work when recruiting medical staff and we have received a great deal of positive feedback from new and visiting staff.