The RAP initiative is a joint undertaking by the Healthcare Improvement Unit and The Viewer team to deliver strategic improvements to Queensland Public Hospitals.
Outpatient information in The Viewer
Initiative Type
Service Improvement
System Improvement
Status
Deliver
Added
Last updated
Summary
Key dates
Nov 2016
Aim
The capability will provide users of The Viewer (TV) with a more complete picture of a patient’s healthcare situation by displaying outpatient and elective surgery information.
Benefits
- Enable GP’s to access clinical information for QH patients
- Improve communication between Hospital and Health Services and the GP’s.
- Ability to track a patient’s journey through Outpatients and Elective Surgery using one independent system.
Background
There are five major applications in QH that currently schedule appointments for patients. They are HBCIS for outpatient appointments (currently in use at approximately 85 sites); Cerner ESM (currently in use at 4 sites, with a further 4 sites in late 2017/early 2018); QRIS for radiology and nuclear medicine (at approximately 40 sites); Mosaiq oncology scheduling - used at most oncology sites (some sites re-enter their appointment data into HBCIS APP for activity-based funding purposes). Additionally, Logan and Beaudesert Hospitals use a system called ASIM, but are scheduled to migrate to the Cerner ESM product later in 2017.
These systems all contain appointment information in their various silos. There is no one patient-centric or site-centric view of appointments within QH. While inpatient information is well documented, tracking the outpatient journey is not as well defined. The Referrals and Appointments to The Viewer initiative addressed in this document will enable a patient-centric, read-only view of all current and previous scheduled Specialist Outpatient referrals appointments and Elective Surgery waiting list and procedure booking information. This data will be accessed via The Viewer (TV), allowing clinicians to see all current and 2 years previous appointment information for individual patients, independent of the source system.
The Viewer is a web-based application that displays key patient information from a number of Queensland Health clinical and administrative systems, such as pathology results, radiology results, medications, allergies and alerts, care plans, as well as a record of encounters (including discharge summaries). It provides authorised QH staff with consolidated clinical information about each patient who receives treatment or care at a Queensland Health facility.
The capability to provide users of The Viewer (TV) with a more complete picture of a patients’ healthcare situation can be achieved by adding Outpatient and Elective Surgery information. The solution will collect information for a number of disparate source systems and present it in a patient-centric display in The Viewer. This information will also be available to Queensland General Practitioners (GPs) when the GP to the Viewer (GPTV) initiative is enabled in mid-2017.
This Referral and Appointments to The Viewer initiative supports Queensland Health’s Specialist Outpatient Strategy, Improving the patient journey by 2020 (published May 2016) which states as one of its objectives:
Your GP, for the first time in Queensland, will have online access to clinical information about you and your treatment within your local hospital service.
This solution does not enable electronic schedule mediation, but rather human viewable aggregation of current appointments and referral requests via facility administration and speciality clinical IT systems.
The Cerner ESM and HBCIS APP & EAM modules are the main appointment management systems used within QH and will be the first source systems to provide Outpatient and Elective Surgery information to The Viewer, along with data from the Appointment Scheduling Information Management system (ASIM) currently in use at Logan and Beaudesert Hospitals.
