Hospitals that won’t make you sick
Despite suggestions to the contrary, Dr Richards takes pains to confirm that the first and foremost reason for collecting the data lies in preventing iatrogenic injury. If the technology rollout goes according to plan most hospitals will begin to experience a drop in such cases long before patient data is centralised.
At the Wesley, Armitage says the hospital is already starting to see the benefits of the rollouts.
“We are already seeing fewer errors and better systems for tracking patient care,” Armitage says. “Just having better medication management will save lives.”
In a similar vein, Fletcher is finding healthcare providers in the Katherine region are better able to communicate over distances, ultimately resulting in an improvement of patient care.
“In the wet season a lot of these places are cut off entirely so the system we’ve got now, where there’s always access to customer information, works much better than paper-based records,” Fletcher says.
If all goes according to plan, the next 12 months will see HealthConnect expand out of its current pilots and more hospitals embark on clinical records management projects. And while it’s expected to take more than a decade, Dr Richards isn’t interested in speeding up the process.
“We will start to see some sustainable short-term results, but HealthConnect isn’t about forcing healthcare providers into specific technologies—it’s about providing the frame work and the guidance,” Dr Richards says.
So while the systems in place in the ‘90s failed Harriet Edna Marchant, they are well on the way to providing better care for her baby-boomer offspring, who are already on the way to living longer healthier lives. :
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