Royal Children’s Hospital to link hospital machines with eMR

The Melbourne Royal Children’s Hospital is looking to take its digital journey to the next level by allowing bedside medical devices to transmit patient stats directly into into its new electronic medical record.

In April the Victorian government agreed to fund half of the RCH’s $48 million electronic medical record rollout, which is expected to go live in the middle of 2016.

The contract for the build was awarded to US ehealth vendor Epic. The hospital plans to use the new capability to track all of its patients electronically, and to transfer some services - like booking appointments - online.

Looking to the future, the RCH is already making plans to use this electronic base to achieve even more clinical efficiencies.

It is looking to automate communications between bedside devices and the eMR to ensure that machines inside the hospital can transmit data directly into patient records in real time.

The RCH is in the market for an experienced provider of medical device integration solutions to enable treatment data from bedside ventilators, nitric oxide delivery devices, patient monitors, blood purification machines such as dialysis equipment and plasma filters, anaesthetic machines and others to be automatically delivered into each patient history.

By taking the clinician out of the process, the hospital wants to minimise the threat of human error in recording patient data and guard against tragic errors in medication management and clinical decision making.

It is positioning the eMR as a ‘single source of truth’ for clinical decision making.

The new Royal Children’s Hospital, opened in 2011, is a public private partnership between the state’s health department and industry partners Lend Lease, Spotless Group, Bates Smart and HKS.