Benefits
For patients, the new hospital information system is a first step towards creating a provincial Electronic Health Record (EHR) for every Nova Scotian. Care providers across 34 hospitals now have easier, faster, and secure access to relevant aspects of their patients' medical history. Patients receiving care in any of these facilities no longer have to repeat the same medical history over and over again, which used to be required even within the same hospital.
Health professionals in these hospitals can now be more effective and efficient because they have access to their patients' information, regardless of which hospital provided the services. When a doctor enters a prescription directly into the system, there is less chance of clinical error due to transmission and interpretation errors.
The new hospital information system has reduced time spent on administrative tasks such as tracking down test results. This means that nurses and other health care providers in these hospitals can now spend more time with patients.
The system also provides better information about the quality and access to services, and has provided improvements in planning for patient services and programs. For example, waiting time data can now be tracked more accurately.
A modern, efficient health information system should also help to attract and retain doctors, nurses and other health care professionals. Doctors can now access patients' results from their hospital-based offices and will eventually be able to access patients' results from their private offices as well. Wait times for test and x-ray results have been decreased with the introduction of NShIS and the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). This also supports reduction in the number of unnecessary or duplicated tests and procedures.
Eventually these benefits will extend across the entire province as linkages are established to the Capital Health District Health Authority and the IWK Health Centre.
Applications
The following is detailed information about the system's applications:
- Admission/Registration (PDF)
- Anatomical Pathology (PDF)
- Billing and Accounts Receivable (PDF)
- Blood Bank (PDF)
- Community Wide Scheduling (PDF)
- Enterprise Medical Record (PDF)
- Imaging and Therapeutic Services (PDF)
- Laboratory (PDF)
- Medical Records and Abstracting (PDF)
- Microbiology (PDF)
- Order Entry (PDF)
- Patient Care System (PDF)
- Pharmacy (PDF)
- Provider Order Management (PDF)