Victoria’s Central Hume Partnership (CHP) is rolling out DXC Care Suite with DXC Lorenzo patient administration system to replace the unconnected systems currently in use in the region’s seven hospitals.

The cloud-based solution has been built on DXC’s Healthcare Cloud based on Microsoft Azure and consists of a health platform and patient administration system that includes patient record management, automated scheduling and pathway management.

CHP project director Jorge Silveira said the partnership project, which includes lead hospital Northeast Health Wangaratta, Alpine Health, Alexandra District Health, Beechworth Health Service, Benalla Health, Yarrawonga Health and Tallangatta Health, operates seven independent patient administration systems that all have their own identification numbers for patients.

Clinical documentation is predominantly on paper, and while there are a number of corporate and clinical systems in use, there are no integrated information systems.

Mr Silveira, who is also the executive director of information management and chief information officer at Northeast Health Wangaratta, said the new system would provide a unified view of patient details, better visibility about the services patients are consuming and a number of opportunities to further the integration of clinical services across the region.

Northeast Health Wangaratta CEO Margaret Bennett said the Central Hume population of 90,000 was spread across a broad area, with Northeast Health being the referral hospital for the region.

“On a daily basis there is movement of patients to us when they are unwell and then back to the small rural health services,” Ms Bennett said.

“You can understand very readily how much of a difference having an electronic or digital platform to support patient movement would be, not only in terms of bed stock and availability and to expedite transfers, but for better components of care. For example, arranging transfer documentation and arranging outpatient appointments and so forth.

“The absolute essence of this is quite revolutionary for us and it’s about being able to have a digital platform to support patient care and patient movement across a broad geographic area.”

The CHP project team hopes that the implementation will enable a redesign of workflows through real-time automation, allowing the hospitals to achieve financial savings and reallocate staff to higher-value responsibilities.

DXC Care Suite is expected to result in an increase in the flow of patients through the hospitals, freeing up capacity and creating administrative efficiencies. The project team said that key to achieving this is advanced enterprise scheduling, which will help reduce errors and align clinically defined schedules.

While the DXC Care Suite has a number of components including electronic medical record capability and DXC’s Open Health Connect platform, which uses FHIR interfaces to integrate disparate data from legacy and third-party applications, Central Hume Partnership is still weighing up what clinical components it will implement in future.

Mr Silveira said EMR capability is not part of this implementation as it stands but is something that the partnership will be considering. “Lorenzo does have an additional component to what a normal patient administration system has as a standard feature and has additional capabilities that is built into the core product,” he said.

“They also have electronic discharge summaries which we are assessing at the moment to see whether that will be implemented or not at this stage. But the ability to bring together the seven different patient administration systems into one will enable episodic data to be sent across the partnership.”

Mr Silveira said he expected the system to be live by July next year.

DXC’s healthcare director for Australia and New Zealand, Daryll Goodall, said Care Suite and Lorenzo offered the healthcare industry in Australia and New Zealand an affordable and modern alternative for a digital health platform.

This is the first implementation of Lorenzo in the region but it currently supports 24 million patients in the UK, including NHS trusts such as Royal Papworth Hospital.