Prescribing cancer treatment at South Australia's flagship hospital Royal Adelaide Hospital has gone digital. 

The electronic cloud-based system called iQemo is now live at RAH, whose Cancer Day Centre delivers 17,000 cancer treatments to South Australians each year. 

Provided by Altera Digital Health, iQemo also features scheduling, dispensing, chemotherapy administration and comprehensive reporting. It is also integrated into the hospital's existing Sunrise EMR, also provided by Altera.

WHY IT MATTERS

The implementation is a first at RAH, said Dr Charlotte Sale, acting program director of Cancer at Central Adelaide Local Health Network. iQemo "[replaces] a paper-based system that was previously used across the state."

"This has significantly advanced our chemotherapy prescribing, making our processes more streamlined to improve patient safety and the timely provision of evidence-based care," she told Healthcare IT News.

The electronic system is now being used by over 450 RAH clinicians and healthcare administrators to manage over a thousand patients, Dr Sale noted. 

According to the non-government organisation Cancer Council SA, about 30 new cases of cancer are diagnosed daily in SA. Each year, approximately 3,800 South Australians die of cancer with lung cancer being credited for the most deaths. 

THE LARGER CONTEXT

This digital implementation at RAH is part of a statewide programme to digitalise cancer treatment prescribing. In 2021, SA Health issued a contract to then Allscripts to deliver the state's Enterprise Chemotherapy Prescribing System. The project seeks to implement a consistent and standardised systemic cancer therapy process across SA. One of its major goals is to minimise the risk of dosing errors to improve patient safety.  

It made the first go-live in November last year at Lyell McEwin Hospital and Mount Gambier and Districts Health Service. Queen Elizabeth Hospital has also fully adopted the electronic solution.

The project targets to complete the iQemo rollout across all 21 public hospitals in SA by end-2025.