February 2012

Ready to Rollout

The eReferrals system is now ready to be rolled out to the 265 Medtech general practices in the Auckland metro region. Rollout will be implemented in five groups of fifty or so practices over approximately six months. Each practice in each group will receive information from healthLink on the installation process, the technical requirements and release notes about the system. healthLink are leading the deployment and will be ready to guide andassist each site to get configured and up and running witho eReferrals.

Details on what practices are in what groups can be found on the eReferrals website – Deployment and Rollout Plan. This plan will be updated on a regular basis.

Group 1 is the first to get going. Start dates for each group are: 

• Group 1 – 27 February
• Group 2 – 19 March
• Group 3 – 16 April
• Group 4 – 14 May
• Group 5 – 11 June

Group 6 consisting of the fifty MyPractice sites will have their rollout dateconfirmed shortly. We are working on getting the last few issues resolved and will then quickly move to deploy those sites.

Feedback from our Pilot Practices

Over the last four months we have been piloting the system in six practices. They have now submitted electronically over 640 referrals to 39 hospital services across the Auckland region.

The commitment of the pilot practices involved, teams in the Central Referral Offices and hospital clinicians who have received and provided feedback on the eReferrals is appreciated. They have given significant time and effort to assist the project in implementing eReferrals. The Medtech pilot practices are Mt Wellington Family Health Centre, Mairangi Medical Centre and Beachlands Medical Centre.My Practice pilot practices are Bairds Road Family and Christian Health Centre, My Doctor and Papatoetoe Family Doctors. Some comments from users:

Jo Blakey, GP from Mairangi Bay noted in the feedback that the Breast eReferral form was “very useful and that it prompted for incomplete info (so not sent without this)”.

Auckland DHB Clinician Susan Stott told us that the “Orthopaedics form was much better than previous referral layouts”.

The pilot has been extremely useful in a number of ways including highlighting the issues of operating eReferrals in live GP environments. Over the period of the pilot we have resolved a number of problems including four key issues identified by our Clinical Advisory Panel relating to medications, attachmentsanddate filters for patient documents. Issues that are not show stoppers have been logged and will be followed up and fixed in the next few months.

Note that two of the Counties Manukau GP practices participating in the pilot are using the My Practice PMS which started in the pilot a month after the Medtech sites. The rollout to My Practice sites is expected to get underway in March 2012.

Below is achart showing the eReferrals submitted by the pilot practices. The highest number of referrals isto ORL, Women’s Health Gynaecology and Gastroenterology Endoscopy. The breakdown of eReferrals submitted to DHBs are Auckland DHB (235), Waitemata DHB (242), and Counties Manukau DHB (170).

Training Resources

All training resources are available from this site, on the Resources Page.

Resources include a Quick Reference Guide Medtech and Quick Reference Guide My Practice 

Video Training Guides are also available for the following:

Medtech

• Generic Referral Form
• Specialty Form
• Park & Retrieve a Form
• Exception examples

My Practice

• Generic Referral Form
• Specialty Form
• Park & Retrieve a Form
• Exception examples

Support

If you have any questions on eReferrals you can ring our 0508-227 326 helpline for assistance. Alternatively you can email eReferrals@healthalliance..co.nz

All feedback is welcome and will be considered.

The Next Phase

The second phase of the project covers online assessment and grading of eReferrals by hospital clinicians and the electronic referring between and within hospital specialities, including the tracking of those referrals.

The project has been completing an Implementation Planning Study (IPS) with vendors. The purpose of the IPS is to confirm functional and technical scope and approaches to meet the requirements. The first draft of the IPS document has been prepared by vendors and reviewed by the ARDHB project team. An initial draft Business Case was completed late last year and is currently going through a revision. This is expected to be finalised over the next few weeks.