What's Changing
- Health professionals across Island Health are adopting common clinical and process standards (including workflows, order sets, clinical guidelines and integrated plans of care).
- Patient records are updated and shared electronically via a shared clinical information system developed by Oracle Cerner, known at Island Health as the electronic health record or EHR. A clinical information system is a computer system designed for collecting, storing, amending and retrieving information relevant to health care delivery.
- Medication orders and other instructions will be entered directly into the EHR and will immediately become part of the patient’s record. This process is called computerized provider order entry, or CPOE.
- Health professionals in acute care facilities will use a fully electronic “closed loop medication management” process. This will help improve patient safety by making sure each medication is prescribed and given to the right patient, in the right dose, at the right time, with the right documentation.
How Things Are Changing
Standardized clinical content
- Order sets
- Integrated plans of care
- Structured documentation standards
- Standardized nursing content
- Algorithms for proactive response to sepsis
- Structured terminology for diagnosis/problems
Shared and improved processes
- Patient intake, triage and admission
- Closed loop medication management
- Downtime processes and policies
- Discharge processes
- Rapid Response Team activation
Better use of technology
- Electronic medication reconciliation
- Computerized order entry
- Electronic bedside medication administration
- Electronic clinical documentation
- Shared electronic health record
- Automated dispensing cabinets
- Clinical decision support
- Results and reports distribution to primary and community care
- Automated monitoring with bedside medical device integration (BMDI) & FetaLink
- Shared data warehouse
