Telstra enters acute phase with Emerging Systems buy-out

Telstra Health has made another investment to add to its growing portfolio of health IT companies, announcing today it had purchased acute care EMR specialist Emerging Systems.

Emerging Systems has developed and markets the EHS clinical information system, elements of which were first designed by clinicians at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Sydney in 1992.

Known as deLacy at St Vincent’s, it has since been developed into a web-based application and is used in both the public and private hospitals. It covers all clinical areas from pre-admission through to post-discharge as well as electronic pathology and radiology ordering, results viewing, multi-disciplinary progress notes and specialist referrals, and recording admission and discharge medications.

EHS is now being installed throughout the St Vincent’s Health Australia (SVHA) group, which includes four public hospitals, seven private hospitals and 10 aged care facilities in NSW, Queensland and Victoria. Earlier this year, EHS was chosen as the preferred vendor for St John of God Health Care, beginning with the new 367-bed St John of God Midland public and private hospitals in Perth. In total, EHS has been chosen by 29 hospitals across Australia.

Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon said Emerging Systems was selected because of the company’s focus on communicating with other systems, ease of use, and a pragmatic implementation approach that delivers quick wins in a hospital’s EMR journey.

“Emerging Systems are a dynamic company and both their team and their software solutions are aligned to our ambitions,” Mr Solomon said. “One of their strengths is that we feel their system can more easily enable a patient to share their hospital information with their doctor, specialist, residential or community carer.

“Strategically this is an important acquisition and capability for us. We are building a more connected health system and hospital records obviously play a key role in that. I think Emerging Systems help us further address that need and better integrate that information across the health system.

“I also look forward to working with their management team who bring a strong skill set, commitment and innovative approach to eHealth.”

Emerging Systems CEO Russel Duncan said that the sale to Telstra Health will provide greater scope and funding to be able to expose the company to new possibilities.

“Our values and vision have always been on innovation, partnerships and delivering for our customers and we feel that these are shared by Telstra Health, in particular our commitment to interoperability of systems,” Mr Duncan said.

The acquisition of Emerging Systems signals a major move by Telstra Health into acute care when added to its recent $20 million investment in Orion Health. Last year, Telstra also took a significant stake in Verdi, the Melbourne-based firm formerly known as IP Health, which has developed a suite of products in association with the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and used by the Mater group in Brisbane.

Telstra also has the Australian licence for the Dr Foster risk-adjusted quality measurement tool for hospitals.

Most recently, Telstra purchased the market leader in residential and community aged care software, iCareHealth, and is developing a portfolio of products and services across all healthcare settings, including pharmacy through its investment in Fred IT and in primary care.

It owns HealthConnex and its suite of products, which include Argus secure messaging, Communicare clinical software, and aged and community care software package TCM. HealthConnex also manages the National Health Services Directory (NHSD) on behalf of Healthdirect Australia.

Telstra also plans to launch a direct-to-GP, 24-hour telehealth service called ReadyCare next year.

Emerging Systems was heavily involved in the Wave 2 project for the implementation of the PCEHR led by St Vincent’s, which concentrated on developing electronic discharge summaries that are now being sent up to the PCEHR and out to local GPs by secure messaging.

It has also developed the capability to send and receive eReferrals, specialist letters and event summaries to and from GPs through its GP Connect module. EHS has a full mobility solution for iPad and iPhones and Emerging Systems and St Vincent’s Sydney are also developing a patient administration system together.

NEHTA confident it’s a going concern

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) has set aside cash reserves to cover its liabilities in case it fails to receive funding beyond June 30, 2015.

In its 2013-2014 annual report, the organisation alludes to uncertainty over its future beyond the next financial year but says it expects that further funding will be provided to continue its work program.

The Royle review into the PCEHR recommended that NEHTA be dissolved and its functions merged into a new Australian Commission for Electronic Health (AceH). It has since been provided with one year’s worth of funding from the federal, state and territory governments.

In the report, NEHTA said that from 2014-2015 onwards, its strategic plan will need to be aligned with the refreshed national eHealth strategy – which Pulse+IT understands was completed by Deloitte late in 2013 but has not yet been released by the federal government – as well as the government’s response to the Royle review recommendations. That has also not been released.

NEHTA has recorded a far lower operating deficit than last year – $12.6 million as opposed to $73.76m the previous year. It received funding of close to $80 million for the year, and has seen a reduction in employee wages and money spent on consultants from the previous year.

It has also dipped into its cash reserves to fund activity for this financial year.

NEHTA states that while it has funding arrangements with the federal, state and territory governments until 30 June 2015, “it is expected that further funding will be provided to continue the NEHTA work [program] beyond the 12 months from the date of this report and as such the financial statements have been prepared on a going concern basis”.

It says that should the funding not continue, it has set aside cash reserves that would be sufficient to extinguish any liabilities that exist at the time.

It has developed both short and long-term objectives in light of the uncertainty, with the short-term objectives to focus on adoption, implementation and meaningful use of eHealth initiatives.

“NEHTA will build on the early implementation work with consumers, GPs and hospitals and collaborate further with pharmacy, aged care, pathology and diagnostic imaging,” it says.

“Working with all jurisdictions on how eHealth infrastructure can be further deployed will also be a focus.”

The long-term objectives are to continue to work on the implementation of medications management and chronic disease management programs, which it says will help drive uptake of the PCEHR towards a ‘tipping point’ of use.

“The more people and providers who use the national eHealth record system, the more valuable it will be to other providers, consumers and other system participants,” it says.

“To this end, 2014-15 will see NEHTA continuing to drive uptake and meaningful use of eHealth across the Australian healthcare sector.

“Areas of focus will be to connect pathology and diagnostic imaging to the [PCEHR], undertake early implementation of medications management and chronic disease management programs, and continue to work closely with states and territories to align the implementation of national infrastructure with jurisdictional health IT strategies and investments.”

In his foreword, NEHTA chairman Steve Hambleton says that the feedback he is getting from the government is positive and “shares my view that eHealth has a strong future”.

State by state: telehealth growth in rural SA

Country SA Health’s executive director for mental health, Rebecca Graham, outlined the growth in use of telehealth in the state at RMA 2014 and briefly touched on some of the problems being experienced with the roll-out of the $422 million EPAS system.

Ms Graham said the Country SA Local Health Network had more than 170 endpoints in around 90 sites across the network, and the service was seeing an exponential growth in the uptake of telehealth.

“We have managed to put eight video conferencing units into seven communities in the [Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara] Lands and while we do have some issues in relation to quality of picture, at times it is sensational,” she said.

“We’ve had young blokes from very remote communities down in Adelaide being treated and being able to see their family via video conferencing. That has been sensational.”

Ms Graham said mental health had been a leader in the use of telehealth in SA, followed by cancer, cardiology and renal services. “It has been driven very much by the specialty rather than being seen as a technical solution,” she said.

SA is trialling an out-of-hours support service for GPs on the Eyre Peninsula and it is also looking at WA’s Emergency Telehealth Service to see if it can be adopted.

“We had a fantastic name for it – SAVES – but we discovered that that was also the [South Australian voluntary euthanasia society’s] acronym, so we are going to be changing that.”

In terms of eHealth, she said SA Health had rolled out iPharmacy across the state and work on the patient master index was also complete.

“With EPAS, we have had difficulties in relation to that – it is a very expensive system and it has been very difficult to roll out and whilst the solution will be excellent at the end of the day, the reality is I don’t know how long it will be before we have a consistent system.”

EPAS has been installed at Noarlunga and Port Augusta hospitals but is facing some fierce resistance by clinicians at the latter, in addition to the documented problems the system has with its billing module.

Ms Graham said the plan for new medical imaging and pathology systems were still in the pipeline but all eyes were on the new Royal Adelaide Hospital, which when added to the research institutes set to be co-located would probably form the biggest health precinct in Australia.

“They have not allowed for any paper records, so we had better find a solution by the time it opens in 2018,” she said.

State by state: eHealth at the bush bedside in WA

WA Country Health’s executive director of medical services, Tony Robins, outlined the four core elements of connecting healthcare in the state at the RMA conference: people, the human-ICT interface, data transmission and software applications.

Dr Robins said it needed to be remembered that in the bush, both patient and clinician moved between health settings.

“It is not the same as the metro-centric view of general practitioners in general practice and specialists down in the hospital – it is often the same individual moving between sites,” Dr Robins said. “But in some of those sites we may have one PC available for multiple clinicians.”

He used as examples of the difficulties faced in providing eHealth and telehealth solutions to remote areas the town of Crocodile Hole in the Kimberley, which has one public Telstra phone box, and the Kalumburu mission on the far north-west of the Kimberley, where “there’s no copper, there’s no fibre optic, there’s no microwave”, but there is the possibility of satellite options.

“Our systems need to have business continuity and redundancy,” he said. “They need to stand up to extremes of temperature, intermittent power supply and climatic events such as cyclones and flooding, where we see fibre optics flooded out for a month. We also have interference from flora and fauna out in the bush.

“We need long distance reliability. We need to ensure that the complete data package transfer over extremes of distance occurs, both as packets and real time over thousands of kilometres.

“In small country hospitals where we mainly have two staff working across inpatient, emergency and aged care, we need the technology to be mobile with them. It needs to be simple and intuitive to use.”

One initiative WA has taken is the establishment of the Emergency Telehealth Service, which was trialled in in eight Wheatbelt hospitals in 2012 and has since extended to 28 predominantly small hospital EDs in the Wheatbelt, Midwest and Kimberley.

Funded by the state’s Royalties for Regions program, it is due to be extended into the Goldfields region as part of plans to have most WA Country Health Service hospitals using the system by 2015.

The service is led by emergency department specialists (FACEMs) based in metro hospitals or at home but has not gone down well with some rural GPs, who believe they have been bypassed and could provide the service themselves if funded.

Dr Robins defended the service, saying GPs were becoming involved. “It is not designed to replace GPs – let me be clear,” Dr Robins said. “It is designed to support them, in particular one and two-GP towns where the GP may be absent for the weekend or there may be no GP in that community.

“It provides support for nurses, it is delivered by emergency medicine consultants primarily, however we also have credentialed GPs involved.”

He said the service had delivered over 10,000 consultations across 45 sites, with only one serious adverse event.

“Nowhere is connected eHealth and telehealth more relevant that at the bush bedside, and nowhere is the challenge to ensure equity of access for country patients to eHealth and telehealth, greater than in rural Australia,” he said.

While he did not cover how WA was progressing with the PCEHR, Royal Perth Hospital began uploading discharge summaries to the system from its Shenton Park campus in July. NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming said Fiona Stanley Hospital was on the agenda, as were some of the other metro hospitals.

“WA has had a lot of attention with Fiona Stanley Hospital, but we are now working closely with them,” Mr Fleming said. “We will probably start in the Albany region and a couple of metropolitan hospitals with the intention once again to get the hospitals up. We need to set dates there.”

State by state: eHealth and telehealth in the NT

The Northern Territory’s chief clinical information officer, Leonie Katekar, told the Rural Medicine Australia (RMA) conference that the NT was concentrating on four main areas in eHealth: telehealth, the implementation of its shared electronic health record, point-of-care testing and a refresh of its clinical information systems.

Telehealth has seen a lot of activity recently with the announcement that Telstra is working with the NT government on the National Telehealth Connection Service.

In the project’s initial stages, Telstra and the NT Department of Health are working on upgrading infrastructure to improve bandwidth in remote communities that are using non-government health services and allowing them to dial in to the government service, Dr Katekar said.

“We have 85 remote sites and five hospitals that are all on the road to participating [in telehealth]” she said. “There are 56 government remote sites that are all connected and we are working in regards to getting the non-government sites connected.

“That has been a little more complicated than we thought but that is definitely progressing.”

The NT is already providing specialist outreach services between hospitals and to some remote sites, using high-resolution video conferencing and IP patient monitors between emergency departments. Royal Darwin Hospital is also providing specialist services to the hospitals at Tennant Creek, Katherine Hospital and Gove.

The NT is also using portable medi-carts and has provided desktop software to its remote communities. “We have the IP cameras in a certain number, usually the bigger sites where you can only get a plane in, you can’t get an ambulance,” she said.

While work was being done on infrastructure and providing the necessary software and hardware, the main challenge of implementing telehealth are largely organisational ones at the hospital sites, she said.

“The implementation issues we’ve had are largely organisational ones at the sites where the specialists are, getting them to dedicate a couple of consultation times to a video conference, because they don’t see the patient being picked up in a car, being driven to the clinic, and then flown to the hospital.

“The implementation issues have been around the hospital sites rather than the remote sites and getting people to change their behaviours.”

The Northern Territory has led the way with shared electronic health records, having first introduced them back in 2004. Now called the My eHealth Record (MeHR), Dr Katekar said it wasn’t until 2009 that the tipping point was reached in terms of the number of people enrolled and the number of clinicians viewing the records.

“We now have 65,000 views every month, which is on a rough average one or more every minute so we have quite good utilisation,” she said.

The NT agreed last year to roll the MeHR into the PCEHR, which was due to begin in May. This has since been delayed by the change of government, but is set to begin in earnest when the PCEHR release 5 is available next month, including the necessary capability to receive pathology and imaging reports.

Pulse+IT also understands that the NT has also insisted on a health record overview on the PCEHR clinical landing page.

The NT is also leading the way in point of care testing, particularly in sites that cannot access laboratory services, Dr Katekar said.

“We are working on a business case of getting that spread across the Territory,” she said. “Currently we have 31 out of 85 sites. We also have a digital ECG program that is enabling the remote sites to send their ECGs electronically as opposed to by fax.”

Dr Katekar said the health department had determined that it needed to refresh the clinical information systems used in the public sector, and had devised an unfortunately long acronym for it – CCSRPP – which has thankfully been given the nickname of Caesar.

“We are going towards fully electronic digitisation of our hospitals at the same time as refreshing our primary care information systems and looking at getting one patient, one record so we can stop the patient having to be the system integrator,” Dr Katekar said.

“We are looking at one clinician, one view, so it doesn’t matter if I’m working in a hospital or working out remote in the way that we use our systems because the interface will be the same, which will help enormously.

“We want to go beyond right patient, right time, right information to actually providing clinical decision support at the point of care, [providing] knowledge as well as information.”

Orion plans to take on the big guys in health data revolution

Orion Health has outlined its plans to overtake the global health IT giants and do to healthcare what Facebook has done to social media by developing “thinking” software that can harness new data sources, use machine learning and ultimately provide more precise healthcare delivery.

Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae told a customer conference in Sydney this week that the company plans to double its product development capabilities by the start of 2016 and to invest in large-scale R&D programs to “have a crack” at revolutionising healthcare much like Facebook has done to social lives.

Orion Health has also restructured internally and dropped some of its musically themed brand names such as Concerto and Soprano, splitting into three solution groups called Intelligent Integration, Healthier Populations and Smarter Hospitals to better reflect the different market segments they service.

Within the latter, Orion has developed three different solutions – Enterprise, Consult and Medicines – that together can provide an end-to-end solution that can run a whole hospital but can also to reach into community healthcare.

While Orion Health is best known in New Zealand and Australia for its Concerto clinical portal and Rhapsody integration engine, the company’s main market is in the US, where it is one of the leading health information exchange (HIE) vendors. Mr McCrae said the company’s current position had been improved by the buy-outs of most of its competitors – Medicity, Axolotl, CareFX and dbMotion – but he wants to expand beyond HIE and overtake the really big guys: Cerner, McKesson, Epic and Allscripts.

While Orion’s revenues of $160 million are minuscule in comparison to the giants, Mr McCrae believes that a revolution in health data over the next decade will fundamentally change the face of health IT.

“We are going to go from 500 petabytes of data (in 2012) to 25,000 petabytes pretty quickly (2020),” he said. “The clinical data repositories out there today can’t store that amount of data. Over the next decade, lots of things are going to happen in genomics, wearable sensors, ingestibles, tissue-embedded sensors, mobile health and social health.

“Over the next decade things are going to change a lot. We would like to become one of the leading software vendors pretty much like Facebook did to our social lives. There is an opportunity for someone to do that in the health area. We’d like to have a crack at it.”

He said Orion Health had strength in that its current technology was pretty recent while others are still working with relatively old tech, and it only used two code bases – the Java web-browser code set it started with and the Microsoft code set it inherited with its purchase of Microsoft’s Amalga health information system in 2012 – which the company was current combining. “Many of our competitors are M&A companies with 30, 40, 50, 100 different code bases and they have a problem trying to merge those things together,” he said.

Orion now plans to heavily invest in R&D to be in the position to harness what Mr McCrae calls the health data revolution.

“[Currently] all we do is take existing data, format it up and present it back to the users,” he said. “It’s pretty dumb software. We should have thinking software – we should be reasoning, making suggestions all the time. At the end of the day it is the doctors and nurses who make the final determination, but we can help a lot.

“The first thing to do with thinking software is to get all of the data from the traditional data sources and put it into a bucket, then format it nicely and serve it back up to doctors and nurses. We can do that today and do it pretty well. Then the next thing you want to do is serve it up to the patient and their circle of care.

“Then we need to add new data sources – devices, genomics, business data, payer data, all into the same repository. Then we need to add a machine-learning, reasoning logic to the data, because ultimately what we want to do is have precise health.

“So to get from here to there, we are talking about some very large R&D programs. All of the products that we have today will probably be obsolete a couple of times over, so R&D is very important. We are going to grow our product development shop quite significantly, across several locations.

“What we are about to see is this fundamental, once in a generation change in healthcare, which is pretty exciting. What we are about is creating modern, web 2.0, thinking software.”

Smarter hospitals

Wayne Oxenham, Orion Health’s executive vice president for Smarter Hospitals, told the conference that in addition to segmenting the business into three solution groups, the hospital product portfolio had also been split into three different solutions – Enterprise, Consult and Medicines – with the latter’s full-line solution to be launched in nine to 12 months.

The Enterprise solution encompasses the full product offering that can run a hospital end to end, including electronic medical records, patient administration systems, clinical systems and health information exchange. Much of the core of the solution has been developed from Microsoft’s Amalga HIS, which Orion purchased in 2012. The Consult solution, which is based on Concerto, and the Medicines solution, which is still in development, can be provided separately but are also part of the full Enterprise solution.

While Enterprise isn’t being actively sold in Australia at the moment, there are plans to do so, he said.

“It is is functionally rich and can run a whole hospital end to end,” Mr Oxenham said. “We think is has some really nice UI. We’ve got integration strength and this solution also pulls in open technologies, so we can take information into our system and export it out of our system or publish it from our system so other people can use it.

“A lot of people are frustrated with things like patient administration systems where you can’t put data in unless you key it in. You can’t get data out in a useful form unless you get someone to write a lot of expensive code. We are passionate about creating open systems with good integration points that other people can leverage.

“We are pretty close to finishing off a solution that is multi-tenant – we can install one instance of our Enterprise solution, and it can run many hospitals. It is very scalable, and the technology that underlies it can grow rapidly with the demands on it.”

The Consult solution encompasses what most users would know as Orion’s Concerto suite in addition to some added extras. This includes a clinical review – what Concerto can do now in terms of web-based, single sign-on access to a range of clinical systems – along with diagnostics, whiteboards and problem lists, and the new Medicines solution. He said this solution would be suitable for Commonwealth countries like New Zealand and Australia, where hospitals and health services have limited funding and need to continue to use clinical software bought over time.

“You might have bought a patient administration system, a lab system, a radiology system but you don’t have them all together and accessible in one place to make sense to its users,” he said. “Consult is really about sitting on top of those best-of-breed solutions and providing views that are relevant to the user into that existing system.

“Then we have ‘doing on top of the viewing’, which is about orders, referrals, clinical documentation, whiteboards, problem lists etc. Our Consult sits on top of other people’s solutions.”

The Medicines solution will have full medication ordering, pharmacy, medicines administration, medicines reconciliation and clinical decision support. While the medicines reconciliation function is available now, the full end-to-end solution is still in development and will be available sometime in the next year.

Orion Health is about to go live in the next few weeks in a brand new hospital in Turkey that uses the full end-to-end solution, the Koc University Hospital in Istanbul, he said.

Closer to home, the South Island’s new Patient Information Care System (SI PICS) that is due to be rolled out to all hospitals in the South Island from next year is being built on the Consult platform.

NRMA hits the road with Living Well Navigator

Motoring services organisation NRMA is planning to build a ratings platform for home and residential aged care facilities and services through its Living Well Navigator platform, which launched online recently.

Aged care consultant Gillian McFee, a former CEO of UnitingCare Ageing who also led the older Australians health community plan for NEHTA as part of the national eHealth change and adoption strategy, told the ITAC conference in Hobart last month that extensive member research had shown that health, wellbeing and ageing were the issues highest on the agenda for the mutual organisation’s 2.4 million members in NSW and the ACT.

NRMA, which is affiliated with other motoring services such as the RACV and RACQ, has developed the Living Well Navigator platform as an extra service to members, providing information on independent living, supported living and health and wellbeing.

As part of the latter category, it has worked with organisations such as the Council on the Ageing (COTA), Aged and Community Services Australia (ACSA) and Carers NSW to launch new products and services to members, including Emergency Home Assist, modelled on the roadside assist service.

Ms McFee said Emergency Home Assist has been prototyped by RACV and has proved very popular with older members. The Living Well Navigator site also includes health and wellbeing content, including articles on preventative health and healthy ageing.

It also plans to begin developing a rating system for home, community and residential aged care services called the OWL system. NRMA has partnered with Gallup to use its CE11 customer engagement tool to develop the OWL ratings, which are currently being implemented in 30 early adopter retirement villages.

“We are doing the first ratings now and we will move into home care and hopefully into residential care next year,” Ms McFee said.

She said the Department of Human Services, which provides information on aged care through its Aged Care Gateway, considers the NRMA platform as complementary to the national My Aged Care site.

The My Aged Care site recently launched home and residential aged care fee calculators on its site, and it will eventually be the gateway through which older people access the central client record which is expected to link to the PCEHR.

Ms McFee said the organisation was also looking to add further services through the Living Well Navigator, including potentially partnering with telehealth device suppliers and services to bring self-monitoring devices to a larger audience.

Eye app for iPad validated for measuring visual acuity

A study comparing an iPad app using a portable Snellen chart found it is comparable to the traditional chart for measuring visual acuity.

The EyeSnellen app for iPad and iPhone has been designed by Perth ophthalmologist Steve Colley, who works in private practice at the Western Eye clinic as well as at Royal Perth and Fremantle hospitals.

Released in 2012 with an update in December last year, the EyeSnellen uses an iPad to display the Snellen chart and an iPhone or iPod as a remote device via Bluetooth.

In a paper published in the open access Journal of Mobile Technology in Medicine (JMTM) last week, Fremantle Hospital researchers found that of 67 people with an average age of 57 tested, the Snellen chart function on the EyeSnellen app was equivalent to the traditional Snellen chart at measuring visual acuity at a test distance of six metres.

As the authors write, measurement of visual acuity provides a screening tool for the diagnosis of underlying disease and can be used as a predictor of the functional consequences of visual loss.

The original Snellen chart, developed in 1862 by Dr Herman Snellen, is still the gold standard using a light box. Although there are many apps available, few have been standardised and validated and the authors say there has not been a study validating the use of a Snellen chart on a tablet device.

The authors – Fremantle Hospital RMOs Pavindran Gounder and Eliza Cole, medical student David Hille and Dr Colley – say that the portability of tablet devices makes them ideal for remote and rural healthcare and for mobile screening units, so they wanted to test the hypothesis that the EyeSnellen app could be confidently used in these settings.

Participants for the study were recruited from the Fremantle Hospital Eye Clinic over a period of two weeks, with visual acuity measurements assessed and recorded by two resident medical officers.

Of the 67 participants, 122 eyes were tested. Diagnoses included corneal pathology, glaucoma, cataracts, dry eye syndrome and seven were post-operative.

Their analysis showed agreement between visual acuity measured by Snellen chart on EyeSnellen and visual acuity measured by the Snellen light box chart.

“This result demonstrates that EyeSnellen can be used as an alternative to the traditional Snellen light box chart when vision is tested at 6 metres,” they write.

They found some advantages of the EyeSnellen app, including the fact that the remote function allowed randomisation of optotypes (test symbols), which removed the chance of patients recalling optotypes from memory.

“Another advantage of the app allowed assessors to observe the letters and visual acuity interval on the remote, which made the recording of visual acuity easier,” they write.

They conclude that the Snellen chart function on the EyeSnellen app can be reliably used to measure visual acuity in clinical settings.

“Furthermore, the application may be more advantageous than traditional light box charts due to its portability and the ability to randomise optotypes.”

Dr Colley has also designed two other apps, one a vision test that can be done at home, and the other a quick lens transposer for spectacle prescriptions.

Best Practice prepares for next release

Best Practice Software is planning a number of new features for the forthcoming update to its flagship clinical and practice management software, due by the end of the year.

Best Practice chief commercial officer Craig Hodges said the biggest improvement on the horizon for company’s practice management solution was the inclusion of a new reporting module.

“Since we have positioned BP management as a premium product, the whole new reporting module contains either streamlined or brand new reports that will help practice managers and owners of practices get a much better understanding about where their business is at,” Mr Hodges said.

“We went from a whole plethora of reports before. We’ve actually looked at streamlining those to make them more efficient and more effective and provide greater information to the management of the practice.”

On the clinical side, Mr Hodges said the company planned to introduce an Australian Defence Force checkbox to enable users of the software to more easily identify working service personnel.

“This feature will assist GPs to assess if there will be potential health impacts on those particular people … empowering GPs to be able to assess if there’s special needs for those people who have worked or are working in that field,” he said.

In response to user feedback, future versions of BP will also be able to populate the National Inpatient Medicine Chart templates.

While not in a position to discuss further updates in detail due to contractual obligations, Mr Hodges said additional integrations between BP and third-party solutions were on the horizon, with some of these relating to ePrescribing and others to do with patient information materials.

He said the company was planning to release the next version of the software before the end of 2014, with testing to commence in the coming months.

Best Practice has also announced that its popular user group conference, the BP Summit, will return next year.

First held in the company’s home city of Bundaberg in 2011 and again in 2012, the event has grown steadily, requiring increasingly bigger venues to accommodate the growing number of GPs, practice staff and vendors that attend the conference.

After a one-year hiatus to allow the company and its staff to deal with the Bundaberg floods and the additional development workload imposed by the introduction of the PCEHR, the BP Summit’s third instalment was held in March this year on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The current version of the company’s software, dubbed the ‘Summit Release’, was first made available at the event and for download shortly thereafter.

Mr Hodges said the next BP Summit will be held on the Gold Coast in September 2015, with the company intending to re-establish it as an annual event.

“We’ve confidently taken the step to make the BP Summit an annual event because we really believe we have so much information and innovation to share with our users that it just can’t wait for every second year,” he said.

“We treat the BP Summit as another important opportunity to meet and hear those users and any ideas or feedback they might have for us. The BP Summit is just as much about us educating and informing our users as it is about us listening to what they have to say.”

eMM ranks highly for patient safety but complex to implement

An ad hoc survey carried out by acute care software specialist InterSystems of 30 Australian hospitals shows that most are currently deploying or are planning to implement electronic medication management (eMM) systems, but complexity and interoperability requirements are significant barriers.

InterSystems, which markets a hospital information system with medication management capabilities, surveyed attendees from 26 public hospitals and four private hospitals at March’s Electronic Medication Management Conference in Sydney and found that while all expected eMM to lead to increased patient safety, 60 per cent cited complexity or cost of interoperability as a significant barrier to deployment.

The survey found that all but one were deploying or planning to deploy eMM systems, and in addition to increasing patient safety, the majority expected eMM to improve productivity and efficiency. However, lack of funding was cited as a key barrier to deployment, along with the need to interoperate with another 12 systems on average.

The survey found that of the features of an eMM system that contributed to patient safety:

In terms of barriers, change management issues and difficulty in gaining clinical adoption were cited by about half of respondents, but the big barriers were lack of funding and the complexity or cost of interoperability.

When asked how many other systems eMM would need to interoperate with, 47 per cent of hospitals said 5-10 systems and 20 per cent said 15-20 systems, with the average number around 12.

See the July issue of Pulse+IT for case studies on the implementation of different eMM systems in several hospitals in Victoria.