Ms Lucy Whitelaw1, Mrs Jacinta Re
1Monash Health, Clayton, Australia
Biography:
Lucy Whitelaw is a Social Worker by background and is employed as the Allied Health Informatics Advisor at Monash Health. She has her Master’s in Health Management, focusing on Digital Health innovations.
Abstract:
Purpose:
Lack of centralised information about frail, older inpatients requiring transition into Residential Aged Care or Transition Care Program (TCP) and the progression of their care led to patient flow delays. Manual data collection was a cumbersome process, leading to potential inaccurate data, and clinical documentation was fragmented. No real-time patient flow data existed and there were no standard daily operating systems to support progression of care or escalation.
Nature and Scope:
Under the co-leadership of Social Work and Informatics, a redesign project was undertaken which included a broad range of key stakeholders to address the identified gaps. This enabled the team to collaboratively design fit-for-purpose, user friendly, standardised assessment and patient flow tools to document progression of care in the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). In addition, a business intelligence dashboard, with real-time data was developed and embedded into standard operating systems.
Issues:
Disrupting deeply embedded siloed documentation workflows was challenging within our large tertiary health organisation. Ensuring clinicians documented in the standardised tool to enable accurate dashboard data required significant change implementation and rapid improvement cycles.
Outcome:
Creating systems to drive new ways to understand patient needs led to:
– Organisation wide, real-time information about patients requiring Residential Aged Care or TCP to discharge from hospital
– A centralised dashboard displaying 'Patient status at a glance', patient flow trend data
– Embedding of a dashboard with real-time information into standard daily operating system for the teams to progress care and to support escalation