Tuesday February 7, 2023
Big strides are being made in the world of Electronic Medical Records (EMR), as researchers, analysts and programmers discover ways to capitalise on this data, for near real-time analysis and visualisation to inform care and other organisational processes.
Late last year, Acting Associate Director, EMR Program Controller, James Burns was awarded the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences Dean’s Award for Exceptional Performance by Hospital/Health Professional staff, working on Monash University programs/projects.
Mr Burns has been exercising his expertise as an integral member of the ADaPt EH: Accreditation Dashboard Project at Eastern Health, led by Monash in partnership with Eastern Health, the Victorian Department of Health and the Australian Council for Healthcare Standards.
“It’s a really great group of people from a range of backgrounds and it’s been one of the best teams I’ve worked on,” he said.
The project is aiming to facilitate quality care and informed decision making among clinicians by delivering live streams of clinical analytics information in the form of online dashboards.
“It’s a four-year project and we’re about a year and a half into it. There will be eight dashboards, and one of them is already live. We’ll be working on publishing our next one in the coming months,” Mr Burns said.
The dashboards will be able to consolidate important medical data to generate user-friendly dashboards which will facilitate the hospital accreditation process in understanding alignment with national healthcare standards.
Mr Burns is also confident that it will also enable clinicians to improve standards and create positive patient outcomes with access to instantaneous data.
“What has been rewarding about the ADaPt EH project is uplifting the data maturity, the organisation and being able to provide clinicians with real time data on healthcare performance and quality.
“We get a little buzz when we show people the dashboards because they can be quite surprised about how useful they can be and how much they can drill down into the data,” he said.
Designing a system that supports healthcare professionals and organisations to do their job with the utmost quality takes some finesse.
Harmonising the management of introducing new tests to the system, privacy protection, developing IT systems among other tasks can prove to be a challenge.
“I think the nature of health care is innately complex and can quite often be a balancing act between making a system useful and quick, gathering all the data that needs to be covered, and then making sure that the people that are reading it, get what they need.
“It’s a little bit like Jenga and we’re really mindful there are others relying on little parts of it,” Mr Burns explained.
The Faculty Award was presented to Mr Burns in October 2022.