GP Dashboard shows patient activity across the health system
General practice teams in the Southern district have a clearer picture of their patients’ hospital treatments and appointments - and have the information sooner - thanks to a new feature in online records system, HealthOne.
The new GP Dashboard gives general practice teams up-to-date information about care their patients receive in hospitals throughout the South Island. ED visits, hospital admissions, and outpatient appointments (including missed appointments) can now be seen along side patients’ other medical records.
Invercargill Medical Centre, a Health Care Home practice with 13,000 enrolled patients, is an early adopter and is using the dashboard as part of its nursing team’s more proactive and coordinated support to patients.
“As a part of the Health Care Home processes, we’re including time for nurses to check the GP dashboard each day and phone patients on discharge, to check how they are recovering, and to book follow-ups,” explains IMC clinical nurse lead Toni Day. “Hopefully, all is well and we’ll just be letting them know that we care. But if things are not going as planned, we can intervene before things escalate.”
“This tool will be far more timely than waiting for a discharge summary and then waiting for one of our GPs or nurse practitioners to forward that summary to nursing staff for assistance.”
Southern DHB application specialist Sara Ross, who worked with other DHBs in the South Island Alliance to help bring the dashboard to Southern, says the new feature closes an information gap between secondary and primary care.
“In the Southern district, for example, we manually generate daily reports that are sent to practices, listing patients that have been admitted, discharged, or that have passed away in hospital,” she explains. “The new dashboard populates this information automatically, as well as outpatient appointments and missed appointments – which is newly incorporated information.”
In addition to presenting information on patients enrolled with a particular GP, the dashboard also summarises number of attendances for each activity type – ED, inpatient discharges, outpatients’ appointments et cetera - for the whole practice, enabling a higher-level view of data and patterns.
A GP or nurse can also click on any entry of a registered patient to directly access hospital records, lab and radiology results and notes collected in Health Connect South (hospital) records. This provides more information and is a back-up source of information in the event a discharge summary is not been received.
“What’s really great is that this is a South Island initiative,” Sara says. “Even if the patient is seen outside of the Southern district, the events and notifications will come through to the dashboard for any encounter at a South Island facility.”
Future enhancements to the dashboard will include adding ACC information and the inclusion of other record types – outpatient notes, for example – as well as getting information from private hospitals and other providers included in the system.