SA Health wins iAward for HIB platform

State public health body SA Health has won a South Australian iAward for its state-wide healthcare integration project.

The agency picked up the award in the public sector and government category for its Health Information Broker project, a state-wide electronic patient record developed based on InterSystems technology.

The system integrates patient data from across all South Australian metropolitan public hospitals and seven regional public hospitals.

It has been designed to replace five separate legacy interfaces used within the state hospital system and to enable the introduction of new healthcare systems across the state, including the new Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) and Enterprise Pathology Laboratory Information System (EPLIS).

EPAS Integration Manager Steven Korossy said the system’s performance has far exceeded expectations and is running at only 2.5% of capacity while servicing the whole state and processing over 50 million record entries a year.

He said SA Health has taken an enterprise approach to transform all healthcare integration into a standardised message as it passes between different systems, meaning new healthcare applications need only be integrated once with the platform.

“Our approach simplifies the whole exercise of implementing new systems and maintaining information in existing systems,” Korossy said.

“The old way would have been to embark on a long, hard, expensive project building a point-to-point solution from the ground up. Now we usually quote for about 25 days, and that includes our change management process as well.”

Image courtesy of Andres Moreno under CC