Sunshine Coast public healthcare services have transitioned to digital medical records.
All five of the service’s hospitals and facilities have embraced the change, scrapping paper-based systems in favour of the more efficient process.
Being on board Queensland Health’s Integrated Electronic Medical Record (ieMR) means patients’ complete records are stored in one easy-to-access place.
Clinical director of digital transformation and emergency specialist Dr Stephen Priestley said patients would benefit from the streamlined approach.
“They can attend any site and all their information, in terms of treatments, operations, medications, consultations, is more easily available to the clinicians,” he said.
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He said it would also help medical staff.
“It saves a lot of time, being able to access useful information about the patient you’re looking after, without having to go in and out of different systems or wait for the arrival of paper records to trawl through,” he said.
The digital records system also allows some automatic in-built safety checks, such as medication allergy checking and drug interactions checking.
“While we did always have allergy information on paper records, the alert pop-ups in the digital system are an extra safety net for our patients,” he said.
Gympie Hospital recently became Sunshine Coast Health’s last facility to make the milestone switch to the ieMR, with Caloundra Health Service and Maleny Memorial Soldier’s Hospital converting earlier this year.
“I’m very pleased and quite proud that all of these services have done a great job in taking on this change and now we’re all able to communicate with each other around our patients,” he said.
Digital health nurse manager Aaron Tyrie said having the whole health service on the digital program made it smoother for patients being cared for across multiple facilities.
“It can accelerate clinical decision making and also give them far broader holistic ability to manage patients,” he said.
“With a digital solution, everything is there, everything’s available, there are significant benefits being on the statewide platforms.”
