Vitro as part of the IC3 solution, delivered a Digital Medical Record for the new smart Bendigo Hospital. IC3 is a combined solution with Microsoft SharePoint and Kofax. Vitro provides a platform to capture, display and manage clinical data, to incorporate scanned documents (hybrid medical records) and to integrate clinical data from external sources providing a system that will manage all aspects of a patient’s medical journey. Microsoft SharePoint will be fully integrated and manage all non-clinical data.

Background

Located in Victoria, Australia, Bendigo Health is the major regional hospital that will service 20% of the state of Victoria and is the lead agency for the Loddon Mallee Rural Health Alliance of 17 hospitals. Bendigo Health offer an extensive range of services which includes delivering all acute and sub-acute services, psychiatric services and regional cancer centres, services are provided through more than 40 locations.

In 2010 Bendigo Health was given funding by the Victorian State Government to build a new Bendigo Hospital. The $630M new Bendigo Hospital project will deliver a world class regional hospital which will incorporate latest design and technology solutions.

The new facilities include 660 inpatient beds, 10 operating theatres, a regional cancer centre, a 60 bed rehabilitation unit, mental health services through hospital, community and outreach services, residential aged care facilities, an onsite hotel and refurbishment of the existing Alexander Bayne Centre into affordable accommodation for families having to stay in Bendigo while they or a loved one is receiving care.

Construction of the new hospital began in 2013 and opened in January 2017.

Challenges

The new Bendigo Hospital was designed using guiding principles which prescribed a “paper light” environment, and a building not designed to accommodate paper records.

The Bendigo Information Services team was challenged with implementing a digital medical record for a state of the art new hospital and regional health service, with consideration to;

• A solution that would avoid change management challenges, that users would “want to use” and a tool to support patient care rather than be an administrative burden.
• Supporting up to 1000 concurrent users.
• Support both clinical users editing and viewing from within the new hospital and within the wider Victoria healthcare centres.
• Effectively manage both scanned documents from existing paper records and the capture of electronic clinical data, displaying them in a single electronic medical chart.
• Full integration all hospital systems including iPM, Pathology, Radiology and Cardiology.
• A system that would effectively manage all aspects of clinical data including discharge summary’s, coding and Release of Information (ROI) requests.
• Support deployment on Microsoft Azure with Office 365.
• Delivered within 15 months.

In preparation the Bendigo team extensively studied the patient journey, this combined with their existing experience of patient management systems and research into best practice led them to a solution that was highly customisable to each of Bendigo’s needs, the IC3 solution of Vitro, Microsoft SharePoint and Kofax.

Solution

Vitro initially went live in Bendigo's existing Hospital, it easily transitioned to Bendigo's new smart hospital in time for its opening in January 2017. Vitro provides an end-to-end electronic medical record (or Digital Medical Record (DMR)) that provides Bendigo with "Speed to Value";

• Allows users to capture, manage and easily access patient’s clinical data electronically.
• The ability to view a patient's medical record in a single electronic chartbook view.
• Provides a single source digital medical record that can seamlessly integrate with Bendigo's existing systems, it incorporates scanned documents from Kofax and patient data from other clinical systems including; Radiology, Cardiology, Pathology…
• The latest technology that is accessible anytime, anywhere from any device – Supporting Microsoft cloud technology with Office 365. Bendigo will benefit from using Microsoft Azure with;
• Microsoft cloud data centre
• An extension of their existing network
• Instant business intelligence
• Disaster recovery and business continuity
• Certified and compliant security layer

"We have also been tracking a number of benefits we have defined associated with the digital journey in particular benefits, some very hard financial benefits associated with the reduction of paper and handling of paper." Peter Faulkner, Chief Executive Officer at Bendigo Health

"Your able to share data widely across the organisation, it timely, its good quality capture and it’s a safe way to manage our data. Our vision is the acknowledgement of data quality, if you’ve got good data quality and are capturing data quality by the bedside which you can do with a DMR then that enables us to look at clinical analytics, business intelligence and population health management." Bruce Winzar, Executive Director Information Services and Chief Information Officer at Bendigo Health

"It’s really fast, all we have to do is swipe, it’s very readily available, we can access even when a patient is down having a scan and we can still access information while we are on the ward and if we do transport the patient down we can access it from the computers down there. When you are working with other nurses for patients that you are not looking after you can easily access their information, it just makes the processes and tasks of a nurse really efficient." Chloe Gloury, Registered Nurse at Bendigo Health