Monash Health to overhaul antiquated clinical comms

Monash Health is preparing to overhaul its “inadequate” unidirectional paging infrastructure with a modern clinical task management solution to remove the risk of delayed treatment for patients.

In tender documents the public health service said its current system requires clinicians to manually respond to new tasks with a telephone call, a process that interrupts patient care.

Because the requests can be sent from multiple areas within each hospital, clinical staff can in some cases receive multiple requests for the same task. This can lead to unnecessary stress, as well as some tasks potentially being overlooked, Monash Health said.

Worse, because many staff manually record these requests on paper, there is a risk of confidentiality breaches as a result of lost or misplaced notes.

The current systems and processes also lack the ability to easily reallocate tasks between staff to ensure an equitable workload, or for staff to prioritise tasks and requests, it said.

To overcome these problems, Monash Health has gone to market for a new mobile clinical task management solution.

The system will comprise of a web or Windows 7 desktop client to be used by a clinical lead for the allocation of tasks using a ‘digital task board;, a mobile app for clinicians to view and acknowledge tasks; along with a back-end server application.

“The increased efficiency will improve patient safety and increase both staff and patient satisfaction over the long periods out of normal business hours," Monash Health said.

“Staff will also be in more frequent contact with each other, allowing for night shifts to become more collaborative with colleagues.”

Monash Health expects the rollout to commence in April next year. It will target overnight and weekend staff first.

The state-owned public health operator provides services to 1.3 million people living across Melbourne’s outer south-eastern suburbs.