Electronic health messaging- The Geelong experience Dr Jeff Urquhart - GP Liaison Officer Barwon Health - ITIM program manager Geelong Division of General Practice - Geelong Hospital clinical assistant - GP in spare time

Background Good breading ground for IT projects 1 central public hospital 210 GPs Mostly under 1 division of general practice 200+ specialists 98% associated with public hospital 2 predominant software vendors 1 main pathology provider 2 radiology providers Ability to liaise between hospital, GPs & specialists

Background Barwon Health 400 beds 40,000 EMD attendances per year CORDis Filemaker Pro In house development team CIS introduced 2001 to all clinical units Funded till June 2003 EDPS Surgical professor clinical champion

Current Projects ed encrypted HL7 discharge summaries (Equery) ed encrypted HL7 radiology reports (Equery) Templates for referral to surgical outpatients and antenatal clinic Currently faxed Ability now to using PKI (pilot testing)

Radiology Reports & Discharge Summaries High use of CORDis 80% summaries completed within 2/24 of patient discharge Equery v2 Simple to set up as already used by pathology in Geelong No cost to GPs Uses FTP Interfaces with all windows based GP software No PKI required however will migrate practices to PKI with ver 3 late 2004

Radiology Reports & Discharge Summaries Equery v 2 Pilot phase Feb July 2003 for discharge summaries Currently 40 practices (160 GPs) on line – 80% Radiology messages from Agfa RIS commenced last week Results Very stable Few failures GP practice feedback Decreased staff filing time No scanning required Consistent interface for checking pathology, discharge summaries and now radiology reports

Outpatients templates - lessons Initial consultation lacking adequate clinical staff GP concerns Inadequate consultation regarding change to business process with possible increased workload GPs wanted information prompting and intelligent interface

Outpatient templates - lessons Consultants Too much demographic information Too difficult to find important information quickly including Reason for referral Which clinic Age of patient Urgency of referral Previous consultant involved in Mx

Future projects ed encrypted HL7 GP letters from smaller departments using ARGUS Endocrinology Neurosciences Pain clinic Diabetes referral centre Roll out other referral templates Pain clinic Diabetes referral centre ACAS

Other requirements Set up mail server at division Set up consistent and permanent ing address standards between hospital GPs and specialists ie