Health Board Finds a Remedy for Records

Maintaining records on more than 500,000 patients is no small task, but the Auckland District Health Board hopes to ease the process by deploying the Clinical Record Information System from Tower Technology (www.towertech.com), Boston.

The largest agency of its kind in New Zealand, the Auckland District Health Board will use the technology to share and maintain records across its four-hospital system. Built on Tower's document and content processing system, the Clinical Record Information System will capture and manage 8 million new record images each year, in addition to the nearly 5 million pages of older records that will be scanned.

Documents created electronically from desktop applications, Web sessions, e-Mail, or scanned or faxed documents will be filed in digital folders for each patient. Test results from departments such as radiology and pathology will also be automatically downloaded and filed in patient folders.

"Electronic access to electronic records means any number of authorized staff can see the latest patient information simultaneously, view it [securely] either within the hospital or remotely via the Web," stated Dr. Murray, general manager, Health Services Delivery Plan. "It also means records can't get lost, misplaced or destroyed."

The Clinical Records system continuously archives documents to a disaster recovery site. In the event of an outage at the primary site, the system can be quickly and easily activated from the backup site.

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