Bendigo Health

Acute

A 660-bed Victoria hospital using Vitro as part of the IC3 solution for a comprehensive digital medical record.

Vitro, as part of the IC3 solution, is delivering a Digital Medical Record for the new Bendigo Hospital. IC3 is a combined solution with Microsoft SharePoint and Kofax. Vitro provides a platform to capture, display and manage clinical data, to incorporate scanned documents (hybrid medical records) and to integrate clinical data from external sources — providing a system that manages all aspects of a patient's medical journey. Microsoft SharePoint is fully integrated and manages all non-clinical data.

Background

Located in Victoria, Australia, Bendigo Health is the major regional hospital servicing 20% of the state of Victoria, and is the lead agency for the Loddon Mallee Rural Health Alliance of 17 hospitals. Bendigo Health offers an extensive range of services, including acute and sub-acute care, psychiatric services and regional cancer centres, delivered through more than 40 locations.

In 2010, Bendigo Health was given funding by the Victorian State Government to build a new Bendigo Hospital. The $630M new Bendigo Hospital project delivers a world-class regional hospital incorporating the latest design and technology solutions.

The new facilities include 660 inpatient beds, 10 operating theatres, a regional cancer centre, a 60-bed rehabilitation unit, mental health services delivered through hospital, community and outreach services, residential aged care facilities, an onsite hotel, and refurbishment of the existing Alexander Bayne Centre into affordable accommodation for families staying in Bendigo while a loved one receives care.

Construction of the new hospital began in 2013 and was due for completion by the end of 2016.

Challenges

The new Bendigo Hospital was designed using guiding principles which prescribed a “paper light” environment — a building not designed to accommodate paper records.

The Bendigo Information Services team was challenged with implementing a digital medical record for a state-of-the-art new hospital and regional health service, with consideration to:

• A solution that would avoid change management challenges — one users would “want to use”, and a tool to support patient care rather than be an administrative burden.
• Supporting up to 1,000 concurrent users.
• Supporting both clinical users editing and viewing from within the new hospital and across the wider Victoria healthcare network.
• Effectively managing both scanned documents from existing paper records and the capture of electronic clinical data, displaying them in a single electronic medical chart.
• Full integration with systems such as iPM, Pathology, Radiology and Cardiology.
• A system that would effectively manage all aspects of clinical data, including discharge summaries, coding and Release of Information (ROI) requests.
• Support for deployment on Microsoft Azure with Office 365.
• Delivery within 15 months.

In preparation, the Bendigo team extensively studied the patient journey. Combined with their existing experience of patient management systems and research into best practice, this led them to a highly customisable solution tailored to Bendigo's needs — the IC3 solution of Vitro, Microsoft SharePoint and Kofax.

Solution

Vitro was implemented to provide an end-to-end clinical record that:

• Allows users to capture, manage and easily access patients' clinical data electronically.
• Provides a single-source digital medical record that incorporates scanned documents from Kofax alongside patient data from other clinical systems, including Radiology, Cardiology and Pathology.
• Uses the latest technology, accessible anytime, from anywhere, from any device — supporting cloud technology.