The two northern Queensland hospital and health services have gone to market for a regional eHealth solution that will provide an integrated point-of-care clinical record covering primary, community and acute care settings in the region, over four years after winning federal funding for the project.
The region won $35 million in funding from the former Labor government's Health and Hospitals Fund (HHF) back in 2012 to build an electronic medical record to replace what are still predominantly paper-based processes in the region's numerous remote health centres and small hospitals.
Covering the Cairns and Hinterland Hospital and Health Service (CHHHS) and the Torres and Cape Hospital and Health Service (TCHHS), the new solution will not include the region's major referral facility, Cairns Hospital, which earlier this year went live with the digital hospital release of the state's Cerner integrated electronic medical record (iEMR), but will take in 11 regional hospital-based facilities and 47 primary and community healthcare facilities, some of them extremely remote.
