Sysmex Journal International
2005Vol.15 No.2
RepublishedThe Use of a Paperless Clinical Results Reporting System : A Hospital Case Study
AUTHOR(S)
Ross BOSWELL
Clinical Support Services, Middlemore Hospital
SUMMARY
New Zealand is a long way away and is a country about the same size as Great Britain, but with a population just short of 4 million people. Nearly 10% of those live within the area that my hospital and health service looks after. The city of Auckland has a total population of about 1.2 million. The Counties-Manukau District Health Board ( CMDHB ) provides secondary health care services to a population of 350,000 people in South Auckland, New Zealand. Its main facility is Middlemore Hospital, an 850-bed secondary and tertiary hospital that has been in existence for more than 50 years and is associated with the University of Auckland as a teaching hospital. ( Its main claim to international haematology fame is Hb Manukau, a very unstable ß-chain variant described in the British Journal of Haematology about ten years ago ).
The hospital provides care at secondary level for most conditions and there are tertiary centres for orthopaedics and plastic surgery and a national burns unit. There is an attached but separately identifiable children's hospital and a number of out reach outpatient clinics. The largest of these is the Manakau SuperClinic to which is attached an elective surgical unit of around 80 beds. This is the catchment served by the Middlemore Hospital laboratory. There are, in the region, about 400 general practitioners, many of whom work part-time, so there will be approximately 250 full-time equivalents. However, since the New Zealand health system has a separate community laboratory system directly funded on a fee for service basis from the government for processing general practitioner referred tests, our hospital laboratory has very little to do with specimens from those practitioners. The community laboratory also processes many tests from our outpatient clinics. At this point it should be stated that in South Auckland there is a relatively impoverished population comprising 15% New Zealand Maori and about 15% other Polynesians who have emigrated to Auckland.
There are 80 of New Zealand's 200 socio-economically most deprived schools within the region, so there is a disproportionate concentration of deprivation.
KEY WORDS
ECLAIR, Clinical Documentation, Electronic Patient Information, Web Based Results, Electronic Report
NOTE(S)
This article is re-printed from the “Proceedings of the Sysmex European Symposium 2003” pp.197-208.