November 6, 2002 - Award-winning software from Orion Systems is powering Tasmania's HealthConnect trial.

The trial focuses on improving information exchange between health professionals caring for patients with diabetes in Tasmania's Clarence municipality. The system will collect and share clinical information between both hospital and community practitioners, to improve communication and coordination of patient care.

Orion's web-based technology solution, based on its award-winning Concerto and Soprano products, will allow healthcare providers to instantly and securely access the latest information on their patients. Patient status, medication information, pathology results and event summaries will all be available 24 hours a day at the click of a mouse.

Using its own Rhapsody interface engine, Orion's solution successfully connects and integrates five different existing health information systems. Information gathered from general practitioners, pathology labs and the hospital will be stored in the HealthConnect repository, also supplied by Orion Systems.

"The challenge for Orion has been to draw together existing systems such as Medical Director, used by more than 85% of general practitioners, and tightly integrate them so that key functionality can be shared. This tight integration is critical in realising the clinical care and patient benefits without burdening GPs and other users with prohibitive demands on their time," Orion Systems Australian Business Development Manager Michael Craig said.

"The trial's timeframe meant we had only 14 weeks to install and integrate this system. We've met those challenges and delivered a fantastic system that will provide a real-world demonstration of the enormous potential of HealthConnect to improve patient care," Michael Craig said.

Examples of key functionality delivered by Orion's integrated system include:

• Enabling general practitioners to use Medical Director to create and send event summaries and medication information from their practice straight to the HealthConnect repository.
• For the first time in Australia, general practitioners will be able to download hospital electronic discharge prescriptions directly into Medical Director.
• Pathology results from the hospital or community will be shared through the HL7 messaging standard, with abnormal results highlighted.
• Clinicians will be able to trend and graph multiple pathology results over time.

In addition to viewing and creating an electronic diabetic health record, information contained in the HealthConnect trial's repository will be displayed to users through the use of integrated views. Integrated views will provide the clinician with a quick clinical summary of their patient, with a variety of different views available to meet the needs of different clinical care groups such as emergency departments or nurses.

Technical Information

Information is protected by using the secure Healthlink network to exchange data with the HealthConnect repository. Healthlink runs over the Internet using the Secure Socket Layer (SSL) protocol and incorporates encryption and the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Orion's Patient Privacy Protocol software enables strict control of access to patient records in accordance with the privacy policies determined for the HealthConnect programme. The software also creates an audit trail to track user access of information.

Orion's Rhapsody interface engine has been used to develop interfaces to the Royal Hobart Hospital's emergency system (EDIS from HAS solutions), an HL7 messaging standard interface to the Pathology Laboratory System (from Kestral Computing) and radiology system (Rados). In the community, HL7 interfaces to general practitioners (Medical Director from HCN) and Hobart Private Pathology (Triple G from Triple G Systems Group) have also been built.