GWAHS Electronic Medical Record
Greater Western Area Health Service implements CDN RIS PACS WEB with EMR integration.
Greater Western Area Health Service (GWAHS) are now in live operation with a comprehensive enterprise implementation of the complete suite of CDN products. These comprise; CRIS, CDN Merlin PACS and Merlin Web.
Australia is a large country. In land area Australia is the world’s sixth largest nation. It has, however, a relatively small population of some 22 million people.
This presents real challenges when implementing Information Systems in healthcare due to the large geographic distances and the narrow network bandwidths that are available in many rural areas. Rural communication networks present particular challenges with low bandwidth environments requiring specialist program developments to maximise throughput with the large file sizes associated with Radiology imaging solutions. CDN has met and overcome these challenges.
New South Wales (NSW) has a land area of 802 000 km2 or 10.4 % of Australia's total area. Within NSW there are a number of Public health services called Area Health Services.
The Greater Western Area Health Service (GWAHS) covers the largest geographic area in NSW. The population is thinly spread across the Area and includes 42 hospital facilities throughout the country towns in the area.
Centred on the Base Hospital in the town of Orange, the GWAHS installation required CDN to build integration capabilities into the IPM Hospital Information System (HIS) as well as the state-wide Radiology archive.
The GWAHS network comprises a CDN RIS, PACS, Web, EMR solution across the most geographically dispersed and rural regions of NSW.
Also, across NSW, an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is being implemented. The EMR provides a “Holistic clinical view” of the patient record by bringing information feeds from CDN systems as well as other hospital based information sources, in to a single clinical view of the patient. Many vendors have had difficulty with integration into this EMR as there are some 50 integration points/messages that require feeds from the CDN systems into the EMR. Using IHE profiles, DICOM and HL-7 standards, CDN have been able to create a ‘plug and play’ facility to integrate with EMR solutions.