“TO BE A VALUE BASED PROVIDER, WE NEED TO HAVE DATA RICH INFORMATION FROM THE START OF OUR PATIENTS’ JOURNEYS THROUGH TO THE END.”
So the MercyAscot team embarked on something never tried before: a virtual go-live during lockdown.
Clinicians and management were involved in the selection process for the EMR and once selected, InterSystems “worked with our business to understand the needs of the customer,” he says. For Gardner, the next steps were about clearly defining how the solution would fit the organisation’s strategic priorities, starting to craft the implementation, identifying gaps and building the necessary resources to achieve their aims. The importance of partnership When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, MercyAscot had been in the final planning stages of its go-live with the TrakCare Patient Administration System and billing functionality. This was the first phase of the full InterSystems EMR deployment, with clinical functionality planned to go live in 2021. As the country went into national lockdown to prevent spread of the virus, however, it became obvious InterSystems staff could not be onsite for the deployment. Gardner says the organisation had done a lot of preparation pre- lockdown and felt that the longer they waited to go live, the harder it would have been. “We knew that if there was less time between that preparation and go-live, we’d have a higher likelihood that our staff would retain all of the hard work they’d already completed,” she says.
Completed in May 2020, the virtual go-live was supported by InterSystems remotely using videoconferencing and other collaboration tools.
It involved migrating more than 300,000 patient records and was one of the first worldwide to deploy TrakCare on the Microsoft Azure Stack, with cloud partner Umbrellar. Gardner says this is the first deployment of the full InterSystems EMR in New Zealand, which comes with some learnings around local clinical safety expectations and standards. The strong partnership with their vendor is “absolutely critical” to getting it right, she says. Embedding a culture of change The next step is to go live with some TrakCare clinical modules in mid-2021, such as medication management, nursing documentation and perioperative care. In the past, clinical notes were mostly paper based. This means they cannot be viewed from multiple locations and staff can waste precious time hunting for files. “The EMR is about making real time decisions with real time information and making it really accessible wherever you are in the ecosystem of healthcare,” says Gardner. The organisation is deploying a single sign-on solution to avoid
InterSystems TrakCare is a foundational enabler for value-based care at Healthcare Holdings, including Mercy Radiology and MercyAscot Hospitals The initial TrakCare deployment in May 2020 involved a virtual go-live during New Zealand’s national level three lockdown Digital transformation is creating a mature analytics organisation, utilising AI and machine learning, and embedding a culture of change
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