Clinical Focus

Clinical Units

The design of EHS is founded on the understanding that Healthcare services are most commonly provided by teams of clinicians organised in clinical units. Co-ordination, both within and between clinical units, is a key factor affecting the quality and effectiveness of their service delivery, irrespective of the clinical units' size, location and the range of services they deliver

Key Concerns for Clinical Units

Practising clinicians working with colleagues in a clinical unit are focused on three key areas:

• Patient care and service delivery processes.
• Clinical records.
• Management and administration of the clinical unit.

It is these very central concerns that EHS directly addresses.

Patient Care and Service Delivery

The support of patient care and service delivery begins in EHS by providing clinicians with access to comprehensive patient information, which is compiled and presented electronically at the point of care, in a clinically useful way. The clinicians' patient care activity is supported by automating many of the tasks clinicians undertake while providing a significant level of decision support. In addition to making it easier and faster for clinicians to complete tasks, the automation and decision support ensures clinicians are appropriately prompted to complete tasks. The system ensures that interventions are appropriate and that unnecessary duplication is avoided.

EHS also provides a means of managing staff and clinical communications using a built-in messaging capability. Important clinical messages are captured in EHS, delivered to all the relevant parties and remain a permanent part of the patients' medical records.

Using EHS clinicians can:

• Map the actual progress of patients against an expected progress pattern based on best clinical practice, during any episode of care.
• Integrate any clinical protocol into the care process.
• Systematically identify, analyse and address variances from best practice.
• Improve standards of care by continually evaluating the quality of care delivered and making evidence based changes to care delivery.
• Conduct research using the built-in facility to collect additional information as needed in conjunction with existing electronic medical record information.
• Coordinate the patient care activity of the whole multi-disciplinary team.
• Have complete control over the way clinical practice is reflected in EHS.

All this can be done at the point of care.

Electronic Medical Record

Using the clinical toolset provided EHS to complete clinical tasks results in the automatic documentation of the tasks. The clinical recording captured in EHS is structured, systematic and consistent. When clinicians use EHS as their toolset they actually create the patient's electronic medical record as a by-product of providing care.

Management Support

The detailed recording of clinical activity in EHS makes it possible to automatically generate management reporting:

• Casemix information
• Clinical activity reports
• Reports on outcomes of care
• Clinical Dashboard - KPI's
• Clinical workforce resource calculation

This information is useful for:

• Management of an individual clinical unit through to a hospital group or enterprise reporting
• Meeting regulatory reporting requirements
• Maintaining and improving the quality of healthcare service delivery

The electronic automation of clinical tasks reduces the need for clinicians to complete administrative tasks and provides information necessary for the management and for administration of the clinical unit.