SA Health went live with its Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) at the 311-bed Queen Elizabeth Hospital (TQEH) in Adelaide this week, part of a wider roll out of the Allscripts-built system that has received an extraordinary amount of scrutiny and criticism since its first implementation three years ago.

With an IT system that has been the subject of such intense interest some might have taken incremental approach, but the full functionality of EPAS – which is both a patient administration system and an electronic medical record – was rolled out at TQEH on Wednesday.

SA Health executive director and CIO Bill Le Blanc (pictured left, with Allscripts Australia MD David Chambers) told Pulse+IT that a much more cautious approach will be taken at the new Royal Adelaide Hospital (new RAH) when it opens in late November so staff are not overwhelmed by both a brand new hospital and a brand new IT system, but TQEH has gone all out.