Nurse manager at a large community medical centre. This means beyond being a nurse she helps organise and manage the other nurses. She also helps ensure that their practice is meeting certain health targets from the Ministry of Health, eg cardiovascular, smoking, cervical smears, immunisations.
The practice is a large community medical centre, in an area of mostly families and children. They interact with patients three ways:
"70% of our adult population is signed up with the patient portal ... The first patient we signed up the portal was 80, he's still using it"
I was very surprised how popular the patient portal was. They use it's functionality extensively; patients can view their record, view their lab results, make appointments, request prescriptions, and even message their GP.
At first the patient portal was 'a real pain', but the GPs are getting better at telling patients that they'll have to make an appointment rather than just emailing the doctors. It's working well for them now and is popular among the community. They are currently not charging for the portal, but they're currently assessing how they will price it.
The Internet at the practice isn't the best - it's annoyingly slow, and goes down quite often. They use a digital record transfer service GP2GP to transfer records, and they receive their lab results electronically.
They use MedTech 32, but are currently looking at upgrading to MedTech Evolution.
MedTech is used for more than just health records, it also is used for administration tasks (e.g., billing, invoicing, booking appointments, patient population statistics, etc.). It's used by both doctors and the Admin staff.
As a nurse manager, Olivia spends about half of her time in MedTech dealing with patient records, and half dealing with administrative tasks.
The chief complaint is that MedTech is slow to update/fix things.
She gives the example of immunisation schedules. Whenever their's an update on an immunisation schedule (which happens fairly often), they don't remove the old schedules. So when a high-risk child comes in, and they need to be on a different schedule, the list is so huge and there are so many choices that it's hard to know which ones current, and it's easy to make a mistake. Some schedules they just don't use, but they cant remove them.
She even contacted MedTech to remove some of the old schedules, but nothing has been done.
In another part of the software, there is a huge list she has to select from. However, it doesn't provide any way to filter/jump to parts in the list - this is incredibly annoying as she has to scroll through all of the options to find what she's looking for.
They also use a few web based integrations into MedTech - one is for clinical decisions support, another is to check lab results online. However, as their Internet isn't very fast, it's frustratingly slow. A few of the GPs even refuse to use them, as they're so slow.
One thing they really like about MedTech is that it's simple and easy to use. They have some new nurses starting in a few weeks - they haven't used MedTech before, but Olivia is confident they'll be able to pick it up.
Despite their integrations are annoyingly slow, they like that they have the option to integrate other systems into MedTech. The flexibility is good for their practice; however, there are a few systems that they want, which can't be integrated into MedTech.
Olivia was not concerned with the idea of multiple healthcare staff collaborating on one record, provided it was secure. She viewed anything which increased accessibility as good for patients.
She thinks if a PMS could be designed which can easily integrate with other software, that would be good.