MEDITECH Expanse is going to transform patient care at our four partner organizations; Collingwood General Marine Hospital, Georgian Bay General Hospital, Headwaters Health Care Centre, and Royal Victoria Regional Healthcare Centre, through the introduction of features not available in the current Health Information System.
Some of these features will provide unique benefits for physicians and care teams. Here are some examples:
Problem List
MEDITECH Expanse houses a Problem List feature which physicians will be able to utilize. In addition to past medical, surgical, family, and social history, this feature will record the active problems on each patient and will allow the care team to quickly access all important information. When the patient’s care team members keep past medical, surgical, social and family history up-to-date, it can be inserted into physician notes without having to dictate it, along with the patient’s medications and allergies.
Hold Queue
This feature allows a physician to enter orders for a patient that will be used at some point in the future, i.e. pre-op orders for a surgery or procedure that will be booked / performed at a future date.
Personal Notes
This feature provides physicians with the ability to write a personal note on a patient that is not saved in the chart. Instead, it can only be seen by the person who enters the note. Here is an example from the Web Acute module screen:
From the Status Board we can see that this sample patient is named “Inpt George Test” and is a 44 year old male in the CCU under the medicine service. He came in for chest pain and has been admitted for 25 days. His MRP is George Karasmanis and his primary nurse is Karen Maclellan. His other active problem is a laceration. The information in the yellow sticky note was entered by the physician. This information will not become part of the patient record, and can only be seen by the physician. There are no labs or imaging studies to view either since they are “greyed out”.
These three new features are just a few examples of the many benefits that MEDITECH Expanse will provide physicians and their care teams. These system features will not only help improve patient experience as they travel through departments within the hospital as well as across our four organizations, they will also help improve patient outcomes as information will flow seamlessly between care providers.
