The new Bendigo Hospital of course is a critical investment by the Victorian government within the Loddon Mallee region and the city of Bendigo specifically. The hospital provides a fantastic digital platform, it’s a very technologically enabled environment and that platform has given us the opportunity to really commence our digital patient record journey. The first stage of that journey has been implementation of our Digital Medical Record, the DMR and that has I suppose started to pave the way for Bendigo Health and the region more broadly towards the key quality and safety improvements that can be expected through the implementation of electronic patient records. Well I guess there are two kind of domains that I think are critical at this point, one is the change management domain, these are clinical change projects that are supported by information technology, so I think we have been tracking our own performance in delivering and implementing clinical change but we have also then been tracking a number of benefits that we defined associated with the digital journey in particular benefits, some very hard financial benefits associated with the reduction of paper and the handling of paper and so forth but also benefits in relation to information availability to clinicians in real time in multiple places, for example so we have a defined process of tracking those benefits and monitoring those benefits and the metrics would say overall this is a good change for us. The vision, the strategic intent of Bendigo health and the region more broadly is really underpinned by the principle of one record across the geography for the patient available at the right place at the right time. Peter Faulkner, Acting CEO

The Digital Medical Record project for Bendigo Health was a key platform for moving into our new hospital and we found that a smart hospital has to have the right architectures and has to have the platforms that enables us to move in stages process to electronic medical records, so the digital medical record project gave us that opportunity and has been a successful implementation both from a clinical sense and an administration sense, so if we look at the key benefits of digital medical records for Bendigo Health primarily around access to the digital record from anywhere at any time, it’s an old cliché but a true cliché that they say that paper records are only there for the individual and not to be really shared. The digital medical record allows us to share the patient information across a breath of our services of our care across aged care, community health, the acute and even into our psychiatry services. The key message from a digital medical record is that you would be able to share data widely across the organisation, its timely, its good quality capture and it’s a safe way to manage our data. Bendigo health was built as a smart hospital, there is certainly a lot of technology and a lot of integration complexity and part of that the digital medical record provides us with a platform that goes forward in a staged process to integration with a range of our legacy applications. Vision I think is the acknowledgment of data quality, if you’ve got good data quality and your capturing data quality by the bedside which you can do with a digital medical record that enables us to look at clinical analytics, business intelligence, population health management as we move forward. Bruce Winzar, Executive Direction Information Services & CIO