St Vincent’s Health Australia is laying the digital groundwork for its Single Digital Patient Record (SDPR) by deploying the InfoMedix Digital Patient Chart ahead of its planned Epic electronic medical record implementation, allowing them to arrive at the EMR go-live with a critical mass of digitised clinical information rather than a standing start.
The Australian-developed, Digital Medical Record and content management platform is being deployed as the foundational digital record that will feed and enhance the SDPR, closing the gap between legacy paper-based processes and the enterprise EMR to come.
“InfoMedix plays a critical role in patient care. It’s closing the gap between our old paper-based system and external documentation, providing digital access to that information on a timely basis, where it’s needed at the moment,” said St Vincent’s National Director, Digital and Technology Business Partnering, Alberto Martinez-Alvarez.
‘Digitising ahead of the EMR’
InfoMedix says the sequencing was deliberate. Rather than wait for the enterprise EMR program to complete before beginning to build a digital record, St Vincent’s is digitising the patient chart now, so that when Epic goes live the organisation already holds a comprehensive digital clinical record ready to integrate.
“They wanted to get us in right away so that by the time they have implemented Epic, they’ve got a digital record that will take that information from the EMR plus other outside systems that enhance the digital patient chart,” said InfoMedix CEO Jeff Smoot.
Critically, the platform is designed to sit alongside the incoming EMR rather than compete with it. “We cohabitate very well with the EMRs that are already in place and really help leverage the investment these hospital systems make,” Mr Smoot said.
The approach mirrors that of Nottingham University Hospitals in England, where records are being digitised ahead of Epic implementation to smooth the transition and strengthen the eventual EMR deployment.
Mr Smoot said statewide digitisation programs and large EMR implementations inevitably run for years, but hospitals do not need to wait for those enterprise programs before building their digital patient record.
A basic digital patient chart environment can typically be established within eight to 12 weeks, allowing organisations to begin scanning documents into a digital workflow well before large-scale EMR programs conclude. Those that start early realise the benefits of the enterprise EMR much sooner, because the clinical information is already digitised and ready when the record goes live.
St Vincent’s manages its own ongoing scanning operations using internal staff and resources. Paper will remain part of healthcare for the foreseeable future — some environments, particularly operating theatres, are not always suited to digital devices during procedures — but those records can still be incorporated into a centralised digital patient record, giving clinicians a complete view when a patient returns.
From static image to living record
InfoMedix originally focused on scanning paper medical records into electronic format. Over recent years the platform has evolved from static page images, which required rescanning whenever changes were made, into records that can be updated in real time and managed entirely in a digital environment.
“Once it’s digitised it can be managed in that digital environment and it opens it up for a much broader range of users,” Mr Smoot said. That evolution has extended the platform’s usefulness beyond clinicians to health information managers and clinical coders, enabling faster coding and reimbursement.
As common data standards mature, systems that once couldn’t talk to each other, the EMR, external documentation, ancillary systems, can now feed a single, continuous patient record. That interoperability is the foundation the SDPR is built upon, one record drawing from many sources. For Jeff Smoot, the platform itself is not the goal but the means to unlocking that data. “Being able to unlock that data is the important part.”
InfoMedix customers collectively store and manage more than two billion clinical documents, with around 100 million added each year. The company does not own or use the information; it provides the infrastructure that enables healthcare organisations to derive value from their own clinical data using business intelligence and AI tools.
A long-standing partnership
InfoMedix has worked with St Vincent’s since around 2010, giving both organisations a long relationship to draw on as they build toward the SDPR. As part of the program, the digital patient chart was also migrated from an on-premises environment into the AWS cloud over roughly 12 months, a transition Mr Smoot described as the product of a close working partnership.
“It took a lot of work; there is just a lot of unknowns when you do these things and things come up that you just cannot plan for. It’s how well you work together to work through the issues,” he said.
“From paper-based process into digital, now into the cloud, and now it’s going to be supporting our future,” Mr Martinez-Alvarez said. “That’s very important for us in our partnership moving into the next stage.”
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