Mater pushes health IT

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 01 October 2009 08:21

IT Industry - Market

Queensland's Mater Health Services is a pace-setter when it comes to the application of IT within hospitals.

The Mater group of seven Queensland hospitals is a major not-for-profit health organisation, racking up 275,000 days of in-patient care, 200,000 outpatient services, 90,000 emergency attendances, 35,000 theatre cases, and 9000 deliveries during 2008.

"We're a big factory," observed CIO Malcolm Thatcher.

Consequently, Mater has a serious IT agenda, topped by a move towards electronic health records (EHRs). "Everyone's heading for the nirvana of getting rid of the paper," said Thatcher.

However, he conceded that the hospital will never be completely paperless as scanning of all the old patient charts in the hospitals' archive could not be justified, largely because clinicians discount the value of data that's more than a year old.

Another issue is that it is still a legal requirement that some documents (eg, pathology requests) are on paper and signed by the doctor.

Continuity of care is an important consideration. Heath care tends to be episodic, involving visits to general practitioners, hospitals, rehabilitation services and other providers.

Information must flow freely for optimal care, but Thatcher points out that  you can't have a national EHR if providers don't have their own EHRs. He suspects that Australia could be as much as a decade away from a national EHR.

Another goal is the integration of the various clinical systems in use at the hospitals. Thatcher explained that part of the problem is that "there's no ERP for health care," and consequently Mater needs to integrate information from a slew of individual 'best fit' applications that have been purchased or developed internally.

These and other goals are supported by a layered IT architecture comprising virtualised storage and servers, a Cisco medical-grade network (802.11a/g and Gigabit Ethernet), a data warehouse with analytics, around 240 applications, with Intersystems' Ensemble and Caché as an integration layer between the applications and a series of portals that provide access to clinicians, patients, and outside providers.

According to Thatcher, Cisco is the only network vendor committed to the needs of the health sector.