New digital technologies, born into the fast-paced world of innovation are surviving and thriving in a climate were industries are evolving at an ever increasing rate.

There are four key trends driving digital innovation in healthcare:

• The strong need for immediate access to clinical information to enhance care delivery and better informed decision making;
• The unsustainable cost of traditional EMR solutions;
• The need for robust interoperability due to the rising importance of connecting clinical information across the continuum of care; and
• The increased focus on connecting clinical research to mainstream health delivery.

In this age of digital adoption, there are two key questions for a hospital to consider when it’s looking to move away from long-standing, working paper processes:

• Is it affordable; and
• Can our clinicians manage the transition and still provide high-quality care.

The Calvary experience

An example of being able to achieve this is Calvary – an Australian not-for profit acute public and private hospital, aged and community care provider. Over the past 15 months, Calvary has migrated 11 of their hospitals from a paper to digital clinical record. A remarkable achievement in itself when you consider the multi-year implementation roadmaps of the large EMR solutions.

Ms Sue Hanson, National Director Clinical Services at Calvary said that a well-articulated clinical digital strategy with an IT vendor partnership led by our clinicians was key to the success of the implementation.

“From the outset, we never supported a one system, one vendor approach. So we looked at the market to find a vendor who would enter into a co-design process for establishing the foundations of our Digital Clinical Record.

“We entered into a partnership with Vitro Software and co-designed a clinically-facing suite of applications that allow us to capture point-of-care information immediately” said Ms Hanson.

For Calvary it wasn’t ‘big bang’. They wanted to do it safely with a low risk migration approach. The primary consideration was, and remains patient safety. The co-design approach gave Calvary the opportunity to design a truly bespoke system that met the needs of their organisation, and importantly, their clinical staff.

The Calvary platform is a fit-for-purpose, light-touch custom App store which will exceed 180 individual Apps by December 2017.

Co-design works for our clients

Calvary Health Care Bethlehem, one the Calvary Health Care group of hospitals has seen some significant improvements in their organisation following the implementation of the Digital Clinical Record, Vitro;

• More than 90% decrease in the time taken to audit medical records.
• 95% improvement in the completion of clinical documentation.
• 75% saving in the costs associated with becoming paperless and these costs are continually decreasing.
• Reduction in the collation of information for freedom of information requests by over 80%.