PATIENT safety is being put at risk, half as many patients are being treated and surgery waiting times are blowing out because the State Government’s new electronic patient record system is faulty, senior surgeons say.
Four heads of units at the Repatriation General Hospital have written to SA Health boss David Swan saying they “cannot endorse the use” of the $422 million Enterprise Patient Administration System which the Government had announced in 2011 would increase productivity.
The concerns have cast further doubt on whether the EPAS system will be ready for the scheduled opening of the new “paperless” Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2016, which cannot operate without it.
The e-record system, which is operating at the Repat, Noarlunga and Port Augusta hospitals, has been plagued with problems and huge cost and timeline blowouts.
The Government has already hit pause on rolling it out at any more hospitals to focus on the implementing it as the RAH, which has been designed without storage space for paper records.
In the September 21 letter, the Repat doctors argue they have used the system for the past six months and were in the best position to evaluate its “abilities and its faults”.
They complain that the system lacks “any intuitive interface” and requires “many mouse clicks and many different screen changes” to complete tasks that should be simple.
“This system was designed to surpass paper notation and make patient management better and safer. However, our experience has not demonstrated this to be the case,” they write.
“EPAS has impacted significantly on clinic activity, reducing it to 50 per cent of previous levels.
“This has had a similar effect on surgical case bookings, increasing waiting times and impacting on surgical training opportunities for trainees.
“This will lead to reduced access to clinical care for patients and potential loss of accreditation for training posts.”
The system was designed to allows access to patient data on bedside computers or tablets.
The doctors say EPAS cannot store images so relies on typed descriptions and files, such as referral letters, must be scanned in and are “frequently stored in unidentifiable and generic ways”.
“As a result, information relevant to a patient’s management will be lost,” the letter states.
“All of these issues represent a direct risk to patient safety. They are also a threat to clinical activity, which will impact on waiting times and indirectly threaten patient safety.”
Health Minister Jack Snelling said the Government knew implementing an IT program of this scale would have “teething problems”.
“They are unavoidable. We will work with our doctors to make this work,” he said.
“We are committed to it, we will roll it out as part of the new RAH.”
Opposition health spokesman Stephen Wade said that having four very senior clinicians release their letter to the Government spoke volumes of the concerns they have regarding the system’s performance.
“This has been a poorly designed project from the start and is indicative of Labor’s mismanagement,” he said.
“The longer the project is in the implementation phase, the higher the cost will rise.”
Source: The Advertiser