South Australia Health Department: Open Architecture Clinical Information Systems (Oacis)

The South Australian Department of Health is committed to protecting and improving the health of all citizens by providing leadership in health reform, policy development and planning.

In 1995, the department endeavored significantly to improve the performance of its renal care units in four hospitals across the state. Renal units provide dialysis and other forms of care for patients suffering from kidney disease. Treatments require frequent testing and monitoring.

Records in the renal units had been paper-based, making it cumbersome for clinicians to pull relevant information, and difficult to share across different locations.

Accenture located and then helped to configure the Open Architecture Clinical Information Systems (Oacis). It was piloted in the renal units to great success and then rolled out to all specialty units across the eight major teaching hospitals in South Australia.

Implementing Oacis required the creation of a standard data architecture and interfacing with myriad admissions and laboratory systems. The Oacis solution enables:

• Clinical Display: especially single point of access to online patient records.

• Clinical Order Management: allowing clinicians to order tests, diagnostic and therapeutic services electronically.

• Separation Summary: helping to ensure continuity and higher quality in follow-up health care.

• Clinical Reporting Repository: facilitating the tracking of medical trends of a given patient.

The Oacis program was supported by a change management effort led by Accenture to ensure that stakeholders were on board with the new system.

Today Oacis supports more than 12,000 clinician-users in eight hospitals covering 75 percent of South Australia's population of 1.5 million. Now other states throughout Australia are considering the adoption of systems like Oacis for their medical facilities.

The Oacis program has improved the quality, access and affordability of health care in the region, and is projected to save up to $45 million Australian dollars in the first five years of operation. Other milestones of the system include:

• More than 1 million patient profiles are in the system.

• More than 260 million clinical service results—for example, laboratory results—are kept online.

• More than 12,000 nurses and doctors access the Oacis system.

• More than 70 clinical specialties from renal to cardiac to pediatrics are covered.

• 80,000 messages per day are received from "feeder systems" such as patient admissions, laboratory and radiology.

• Duplicate tests have decreased.