Queensland Health has installed Ocean Informatics’ Multiprac Infection Control (IC) system in 22 of its hospitals, with the Northern Territory also beginning to roll it out this month.
Queensland’s Centre for Healthcare Related Infection Surveillance and Prevention (CHRISP) first installed the system at the Gold Coast, Princess Alexandra and Royal Brisbane hospitals earlier this year, with 19 others coming on board in June.
Multiprac IC has also been installed at St Vincent’s Holy Spirit Northside and St Andrew’s Toowoomba private hospitals in Queensland. The Northern Territory Department of Health began implementing the system and its sister product, Multiprac Staff Health (SH), in its five public hospitals this month.
Multiprac is built upon openEHR standards, first devised by Ocean Informatics’ founders Sam Heard and Thomas Beale. openEHR is now an international standard for the storage and management of data in electronic health records.
Ocean Informatics’ national engagement manager for Multiprac, Joe Griffiths, said the Multiprac system is able to interface with pathology and patient administration systems to draw in demographic and clinical data to track healthcare associated infections (HAIs) and infectious diseases such as MRSA, C. difficile, tuberculosis, norovirus and Legionnaire’s disease.
It is a full infection management program that includes structured surveillance for surgical site infections, blood stream infections, significant organisms, contact tracing and outbreaks.
Mr Griffiths said the previous systems used by Queensland Health were hospital-specific and not integrated, meaning infection control practitioners (ICPs) were not aware of cross-facility infections.
However, with the introduction of the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standard 3, it is now a requirement to know if a patient has previously been in another hospital with an infection.
“QH CHRISP chose Multiprac because infection control needed to be on a single, centralised, facility-based system with central reporting, it had to be web-based and it had to be integrated,” Mr Griffiths said.
“Admissions, discharges and transfers of all of the patients come into our system so we know who has been in and out of hospital and where they are. This is required so the system can do a contact trace.
“If you have someone with an infectious disease, you can find the people who were in the ward with them. That used to take a great amount of effort and time, but now you’ve got speed of response and the ICPs can respond faster to an infection or potential outbreak.”
Mr Griffiths said microbiology and serology information was drawn into the system atomically. Multiprac’s business rules engine is then able to trace the emergence of significant organisms in real time and to create notifications and infection care plans.
“The feeds are essential,” he said. “These reduce the amount of data capture effort for the infection control practitioner by giving them near-time feeds.”
The system also allows ICPs to follow protocols and document actions across the entire infection management program, such as for isolating patients and providing education, he said. It also handles all of the numerous reporting requirements for infection control practices and outbreaks.
The company also markets a shared care planning system called Multiprac CP, which has been chosen by Western Sydney Medicare Local for its LinkedEHR care planning solution. This will be offered to local GPs for free to enable them to do shared care planning for GP management plans and team care arrangements.
Ocean Informatics’ technology is also used in the Northern Territory’s My Electronic Health Record (MeHR) system.
The company was recently named Microsoft’s Health Partner of the Year at the Microsoft Australia Partner Awards (MAPA 2013), primarily for Multiprac IC.
