Tasmania has gone to market for further e-health services in a continuation of its push to upgrade the health technology capabilities in its hospitals.
The newest request for tender looks for a clinical care system that will first be rolled out at the neo-natal and paediatric intensive care unit of the Royal Hobart Hospital, which has 14 beds and would have 70 users. Its estimated cost for acquisition and implementation is $500,000.
Yet this small implementation could be the start of a larger roll-out. "The department's long-term vision is for a single, state-wide system for critical care medicine that may be deployed to any relevant site within the Department of Health and Human Services," the tender documents said. The time scale for this to happen was five to 10 years.
The system will replace current manual systems with electronic recording of clinical information through direct entry, data collection from different hospital devices and analysis of health information. The system has to interface with other existing and future health systems in the state.
The new system, which has to use the Tasmanian unique health identifier as its primary index field, will allow the department to keep tabs on key outcomes such as number of admissions, diagnosis, outcome, infection rates, complication rates and drug errors.
iPharmacy is currently implemented in all hospital pharmacies and the department is currently implementing iPatient Manager in all hospitals in the state via an over $4 million contract with iSoft to upgrade the system from the state's HOMER patient administration system to the newer iSoft iPatient Manager. The implementation is occurring region by region, and the government anticipates it will be finished by the end of 2009.
Tasmania also recently released a tender for a vendor to undertake a project to replace the state's radiology information system as well as to replace or extend the existing picture archive and communications system Carestream, which is currently in use in Royal Hobart Hospital and Launceston General Hospital.
