Why are you creating an Electronic Records System?

There’s a lot of issues that we have with a paper record system: records can go missing, they can’t be made networkable, so the electronic record is resolving some of these issues, making information more accessible, making it easier for the clinicians to get it faster.

Our end game would be to be in a situation where if you get into a little bit of dire straits and you had some sort of a condition, that your record could be accessed by that provider anywhere in the world.

What were some 2007 milestones for the Electronic Records System?

A big part of 2007 was convincing our clinicians that this was a good idea. It’s certainly not that every hospital in Queensland is taking this path.

The Verdi software at the moment is in a pilot mode, where the clinical users will decide at the end of the day whether they will roll this out right across every hospital within the Mater.

Two of our obstetric teams and one of our adult respiratory teams are currently using it as their main, you know, electronic record type resource for accessing results.

How’s it going?

There’s still a lot of work to be done. We’ve wired into just a limited number of systems within the Mater and we’ve still got probably, what we think is, a years worth of development still, just to hook into all the Mater systems.