Next generation e-Health - Providing better care and communication

Emerging Health Solutions (EHS) was designed for Australian hospitals by Australian clinicians, this secure, web-based clinical information system provides quality patient care by improving clinical communications, creating effective and efficient processes, and aiding risk identification and management.

About EHS
Clinical staff at Australia’s most prestigious private hospital, St Vincent’s in Sydney, faced the limitations of paper records and wanted to find a more efficient way. We collaborated with them to produce an effective technology solution that supports multidisciplinary care teams. We found that linking clinicians with a patient health record system allows faster access to patient information, resulting in more responsive and informed treatment.

There is an extensive list of modules included in EHS. Each of these works with other systems easily via our integrated interface engine. This engine accepts HL7, web-service transactions and other accepted Health IT standard protocols.

Who benefits most from EHS?

1. Patients. EHS means better care for patients because it’s easy to crosscheck care guides, and any inconsistencies in treatment are immediately identified. Patient records from all hospitals are in one place – online – so it doesn’t matter where the patient is treated, the treatment notes are always up to date.


2. Clinical staff. With EHS, important patient information is at clinicians’ fingertips. As everything is online, staff spend less time tracking down paperwork and more time on patient care. EHS is also simple to use. It is based on a typical web browser environment that takes about 30 minutes to learn.

Key clients
Our key clients include St Vincents & Mater Health Sydney (two private and one public hospital across two campuses) as well as the South Australian Department of Health (a single-enterprise deployment across the entire state).

The EHS/CPS system was recently introduced to the Lyell McEwin Hospital in SA, following the training of 1200 nurses and midwives.

EHS places our user hospitals at the forefront of the push towards electronic health records. SA Health’s chief information officer David Johnston says, “Many patients have said that they are enjoying the nurse sitting at their bedside asking questions while working on the computer, as it makes them feel more involved in their care.”

EHS and Sabacare
A major recent innovation is the integration of Sabacare’s Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System into EHS, a diagnosis framework integrated in SNOMED CT.

SNOMED CT is a standardised healthcare terminology including comprehensive coverage of diseases, clinical findings, therapies, procedures and outcomes. It provides the core general terminology for the electronic health record (EHR) and contains more than 357,000 concepts with unique meanings and formal logic-based definitions organised into hierarchies. SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive multilingual clinical healthcare terminology available in the world.

Sabacare’s CCC System is a standardised, coded nursing terminology that identifies the discrete elements of nursing practice. CCC provides a unique framework and coding structure for capturing the essence of patient care in all health care settings.

Why is this important to clinicians?

• It helps provide a problem/diagnosis list from their assessments, enabling clinical decision-making to identify patient needs.


• It helps to rationalise and clarify the care provided to patients by clinicians, enabling more defined and accurate coding for costing and reporting, which they have previously been unable to do.


• It provides for the ability to report and identify potential problems, evaluate appropriate treatment and report on patient outcomes for these diagnoses.

See EHS in action
South Australian Government – Department of Health – EHS – a Statewide Nursing Information System known as Clinical Practice Support (CPS). See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwtiNpqOYtg

St Vincent’s Private Hospital – EHS – a Hospital Wide Clinical & Ward Management System known as deLacy. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REn6eUQFRpQ