St. George’s Hospital Takes a Fast Track to Electronic Patient Records

After evaluating competing healthcare information systems, St. George’s, one of New Zealand’s leading private hospitals, selected TrakHealth’s Caché- and Ensemble-based TrakCare system to replace its aging applications. But before deploying TrakCare for general use, the system had to comply with the government’s mandate of integration with New Zealand’s National Health Index. The NHI is a centrally maintained database of a unique numeric identifier, demographic data, and known risk factors for each patient.

“Having an integration platform built into TrakCare gives you the confidence that there is a great deal of flexibility, enabling smooth integration with other systems in the future.”

-Greg Brooks
Finance Manager
St. George's Hospital

“Integration with the NHI was a critical piece for TrakHealth,” says Greg Brooks, finance manager for St. George’s Hospital. “It was not a simple task; other vendors said TrakHealth would have a lot of difficulty in getting NHI compliance.”

TrakCare’s ability, using its embedded InterSystems Ensemble integration technology, to quickly integrate with the NHI demonstrated how easy it would be for St. George’s Hospital to connect with other healthcare systems, such as external pathology and radiology. “Having an integration platform built into TrakCare gives you the confidence that there is a great deal of flexibility, enabling smooth integration with other systems in the future,” says Brooks.

Success has been swift in coming. Even with the conversion, and NHI certification, the software took just eight months to implement and has put the hospital on the leading edge of worldwide healthcare practices.

In phase one of the TrakCare rollout, the hospital created a Patient Administration System with a hospital-wide Electronic Patient Record, Operating Theatre Management, and Maternity Management.

In the second phase, the hospital will use the software to deliver medical records tracking, integration with external pathology and radiology systems, and clinical discharge summaries, which can be communicated externally to surgeons and general practitioners.

“With phase two, we also will give system access to primary users like surgeons,” says Brooks, “so they can use the system to see what theater space is available, for example. There will be a lot of innovation going forward.”