Standing from left: Sally Nicholas, Operations Manager, Older Persons Health & Rehabilitation; Teri Thomas from Orion Health; with David Meates and Stella Ward.
The South Island Patient Information Care System (SI PICS) has reached another major milestone on its way to becoming the South Island’s single shared patient administration system. Canterbury’s Burwood Hospital is the first health care provider in the South Island to adopt SI PICS across all its services.
At a lunch held at Burwood Hospital and The Princess Margaret Hospital (currently home to the SI PICS development team) simultaneously, Canterbury DHB Chief Executive, David Meates, Executive Lead Innovation and ICT for Canterbury and West Coast DHBs, Stella Ward, and representatives from global software company Orion Health celebrated this significant milestone.
SI PICS is replacing eight patient management systems currently in use across the region. These ageing systems aren’t integrated and their software doesn’t work so well as time passes.
SI PICS is being developed through an agreement between Orion Health and the five South Island district health boards through the South Island Alliance. It provides a record of patient activity, including community, outpatient and inpatient appointments, waitlist management, admissions and discharges, as well as alerts and allergies.
Stella says that since SI PICS was first introduced in Older Person’s Health and Rehabilitation Outpatient and Community Services in May 2016, “our users have done an amazing job – they have had to learn the new system and gain confidence in it, which takes time. They also helped us identify areas that need improving to make SI PICS more user-friendly.
“When the rollout is complete, SI PICS will streamline the patient journey through the South Island’s health services, between community services and hospitals across the region. Once the Canterbury implementation is complete, Nelson Marlborough DHB is next on the list.
“SI PICS represents a quantum leap in our ability to plan, track and inform the patient journey in a system that will effectively remove unintended barriers to integrated care between South Island DHBs. For the patient, this means that we can track their care through the system no matter where they start or finish their South Island Health journey.
“In the not-so-distant future a patient could be seen in Bluff, admitted in Dunedin, treated in Christchurch and discharged to community-based care in Nelson with a single system tracking their progress and assisting staff in planning the next stage in their journey,” Ms Ward says.
Since go-live, in one year of using SI PICS (not including the latest surgical/spinal go-live) there have been around:
- 350 users regularly using SI PICS
- 13,000 patient records updated
- 39,000 new referrals entered
- 54,000 waitlist entries created
- 55,000 outpatient visits managed
- 77,000 community visits managed
- 1,000 inpatient admissions managed (since March 2017).
“Replacing those eight admin systems and building something that would be scalable for use right across the South Island (and potentially beyond) was always an ambitious undertaking. Thanks to our strategic partners Orion Health for their unique and irreplaceable expertise, to our South Island partners for their input and flexibility, to the dedication of our talented SI PICS team, and of course to our staff users for their patience and adaptability, bold is quickly becoming beautiful,” Stella says.“SI PICS is yet another example of our transformational system thinking at its best, made possible by the strong relationships and collaboration that have become a South Island trademark.”
