General practice teams in the Southern district in New Zealand are able to view their patients’ hospital treatments and appointments via a new GP Dashboard.

The dashboard was originally developed by Canterbury District Health Board (DHB) and Orion Health as part of the migration from Homer to the South Island Patient Information Care System and has been rolled out across Canterbury.

Now live in the Southern district, the dashboard gives general practice teams up-to-date information on emergency department visits, admissions and outpatient appointments at hospitals throughout the South Island. 

In the future, it will also include Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) information, different record types such as outpatient notes and information from other health providers like private hospitals.

Southern DHB application specialist Sara Ross said the dashboard closes an information gap between secondary and primary care.

“In the Southern district we manually generate daily reports that are sent to practices, listing patients that have been admitted, discharged or that have passed away in hospital,” she explained.

“The new dashboard populates this information automatically, as well as outpatient appointments and missed appointments – which is newly incorporated information.”

The GP dashboard also summarises the number of attendances for each activity type – ED, inpatient discharges, outpatient appointments – for the whole practice, enabling a higher level view of data and patterns.

A GP or nurse can click on any entry of a registered patient to directly access hospital records, lab and radiology results and notes collected in the South Island’s clinical portal Health Connect South.

“Even if the patient is seen outside of the Southern district, the events and notifications will come through to the dashboard for any encounter at a South Island facility,” Ross said.

Invercargill Medical Centre, a Health Care Home practice with 13,000 enrolled patients, is an early adopter and is using the dashboard as part of its nursing team’s more proactive and coordinated support to patients.

“As a part of the Health Care Home processes, we’re including time for nurses to check the GP dashboard each day and phone patients on discharge, to check how they are recovering and to book follow-ups,” said IMC clinical nurse lead Toni Day.

“Hopefully, all is well and we’ll just be letting them know that we care. But if things are not going as planned, we can intervene before things escalate.”

The GP Dashboard is accessed via shared care record system HealthOne and is available for implementation in other South Island districts.

This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.