Exploring by Topic: shared records

One of the fastest growing areas of eHealth is that of online enquiry into GP and pharmacy records.  CareInsight is a leading tool for performing online enquiries and over the past year has really proved its worth.  As you can see from the graph below, the look-up numbers are climbing very fast, with nearly 1,000 successful queries performed in November alone.  CareInsight is now installed in the Hawkes Bay, Nelson, Gisborne and right across Northland (including hospital and after hours facilities in Whangarei, Dargaville, The Bay of Islands and Kaitaia).  The sheer usefulness of the CareInsight system has sparked considerable interest from both New Zealand and Australia; where we will begin offering services in the new year.

New CareInsight Products – Soon To Be Released

We are pleased to announce that we will be offering three distinct CareInsight services during 2013:

• CareInsight Pharmacy – providing the ability for pharmacies to ask for information they need for long term care of patients

• CareInsight Population Health – Allowing access to information across multiple systems in order to provide detailed and up-to-date information about a patient or group of patients, and;

• CareInsight ED – The initial CareInsight system now widely used in ED and after hours centres.

Both CareInsight Pharmacy and CareInsight Population Health are being designed to meet the specific needs of users and to ensure that the privacy principles set out in the CareInsight Privacy Impact Assessment are adhered to.

If you would like to know more about what HealthLink is doing with its new range of online services or about ways in which electronic messaging can be utilised to streamline healthcare delivery, please feel free to contact me.

When a patient arrives at a hospital emergency department it is probably one of the most distressing experiences they will ever have.  So it is essential that we do everything to ensure that each and every emergency department visit goes as well as possible.  By having information about a patient’s existing medical conditions, current treatment plan and medication history ED staff get a “running start” in terms of getting their emergency care underway.  CareInsight is a system that makes that possible.  The CareInsight system is a world first in its field.  It is an online system that hospital and after-hours clinicians use to obtain important information about ED patients, directly from their general practices and pharmacies’ medical records systems.

CareInsight provides an instant window into the patient’s relevant medical details and provides hospital ED staff with the totally reliable and up-to-date information that they need to make the right interventions and get urgent treatements underway swiftly and confidently.

A few weeks ago in the Hawke’s Bay District Health Board region, ED staff performed 122 successful CareInsight lookups.  Usage has been growing steadily over the past year but this is a new record.

Now in daily use for over a year, CareInsight is really proving its worth and has become an essential ED tool.  Five regions have now implemented CareInsight or are in the process of rolling it out.  It’s interesting to dwell on the proposition that if the results gained in the Hawke’s Bay were extrapolated across New Zealand*, more than 6,000 lookups would have occurred last week.

To learn more about CareInsight, you can view the video below or refer to our Privacy Impact Assessment.

*Hawke’s Bay is home to 2% of New Zealand’s population.

Drs Mark Barlow and Paul Sellors (in the video below) from Hawke’s Bay Hospital say that their new CareInsight service enables safer emergency care for their patients 24 x 7, by allowing authorised ED doctors like themselves access to up to date patient records, consisting of recent prescriptions, recent diagnoses and medical alerts.  The system has now been used up to 30 times daily at the hospital to look up vital information from GP and pharmacy records, particularly after-hours, with the patient’s consent and without the need for frequent data extracts or storing any information outside the practice system.

Dr Mark Barlow says, “Often patients presenting to the Emergency Department have no recollection or limited recollection of what medications they’re on or changes to medication and sometimes they’re too sick or unwell to be able to give us that information.  After hours this creates significant difficulty because often the General Practitioner’s offices are closed or the pharmacy may be closed and so we really have little idea about what current medication or current medical problems the patient has.  Care Insight has significantly improved our access to health information about these sort of patients.  We’re able to access a list of current medications and prescriptions and a list of recent and past medical problems on many patients presenting to the Emergency Department and this allows us to have more information to make the right decisions about patient management.”

Dr Paul Sellors explains, “The information that it gives you often at that time of day – you can’t obtain it anywhere else and I would say in a few cases it has revolutionised a patient’s care and I think it really has helped my practice.  I strongly recommend it, I think it’s a brilliant system.”

ED Nurse, Sandy Brown, who has been a key driver of the project at Hawke’s Bay says training the doctors is easy.  “Does it take them long to learn how to be self-sufficient?  No – five minutes and we’re away.  They’re on the screens anyway, they just click a button, then they put in the details they require, it comes up and they hit the access they want and it just opens and then they can just print from there.  It’s actually pretty straightforward.  Once they fall into the organisation’s way of working, it’s easy because it just falls in as part of their patient management system anyway.  It’s simple, it gives them the information they require.”

The CareInsight system is also now being used in Nelson, Gisborne and Northland and because the system requires regional collaboration it is being offered to primary care organisations (PHOs) and district health boards (DHBs).  Because this sort of system is browser-based but the actual software lives on the GP’s site, it is cheaper, simpler and easier to use and doesn’t require large centralised infrastructure, unlike national systems like Australia’s PCEHR.

Read Pulse+IT magazine’s article, “Secure Health Record Sharing With No Big Build”  to find out more about CareInsight.

As the journey to the PCEHR begins its approach to the station, is the end result going to be a smooth disembarkation or an absolute train wreck? The answer may lie somewhere in between, but whatever happens, it is important that the work already done on standards, terminologies and the foundation pieces of eHealth are not lost for the future.

Read the rest of my article on PCEHR here, at Pulse + IT magazine.

Have Your Say

Will the PCEHR have a happy ending or will it be a complete train wreck?  To leave a comment, click on the title of this article or the comment link just below the title.  You will see the comment section at the bottom of that page.

As a supplier of services to the health sectors of New Zealand, Australia and Canada, HealthLink has learned to tread carefully with respect to political issues, however one of the areas we have continued to voice our views on is the centralisation of records and the creation of national or even regional patient record databases.

A key reason for this is that we are very concerned that privacy risks are undermining our ability to use IT to solve healthcare problems.  Around the world more and more incidents are occurring in which patient information is misplaced or lost.

The following is a recent example of this from e-Health Insider, an English weekly eNews magazine that provides a lot of information about what is going on in the curious world of e-health.

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