The Royal Children's Hospital (RCH) has flagged its intention to push ahead with e-health and roll out an Electronic Medical Record.
The Electronic Medical Record is being deployed in response to the Victorian Government’s $360 million whole-of-health ICT strategy aimed at modernising and replacing ICT systems throughout the state's public healthcare sector.
According to RCH documents, the organisation is looking to deploy a scanned medical record system as a major component of the overall Electronic Medical Record.
The system, to be used across the entire organisation and satellite sites, will allow for the scanning of patient notes, which would otherwise be contained in the hard copy medical record, according to RCH documents.
The medical record system will also be integrated with other systems including imaging, pathology and medical imaging via a single login to improve access to patient information.
Further, the system will also interface with the RCH’s current and future patient information management system, provide stringent security protocols regarding access to patient information on both patient and record levels, and be capable of indexing individual forms and storing patient information in the correct location or patient file using barcodes.
Giving some indication of how difficult a move to e-health is for the public health sector, the RCH said it anticipated that there will be approximately 2.4 million pages scanned into the system from year one of go-live.
The RCH also has about 9.4 million documents held in its primary storage facility which would need to be backscanned into the system prior to the departmental move into a new hospital facility in November 2011. An additional one million sub-files were also required to be scanned, the RCH said.
Between 2011 and 2018 the system will need to scan in close to 25 million documents.