Olivia

Nurse manager at a large community medical center

Olivia is a nurse manager. This means beyond being a nurse, she helps organize 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, immunizations.

Their practice has a lot of freedom in the tools they choose, and how they run it. They were the first computerized medical center in New Zealand in the 80s, and are commonly a pilot practice.

They interact with patients three different ways:

70% of our adult population is signed up with the patient portal. The first patient they signed up was 80 - he's still using it.

I was super impressed at how popular the patient portal was. Patients can view their health record, see their lab results, organize appointments, request prescriptions, and even email their GP. For example, a patient could ask, "I can see my results, but what does it mean", and get a detailed reply from their GP. They are currently not charging for this service, but are trying to figure out how they're going to.

The surrounding community is mostly families and children, but a surprising amount of elderly patients use the patient portal.

They use medtech for more than just patient records - they use it for billing, appointments, invoicing. The admin staff use it as well. As a nurse manager Olivia spends about half of her time in medtech dealing with admin information, and half medical records.

Their appointment times with nurses are 15 mins, which is faster than most, but she says the nurses are really quick at their job.

Annoyances

The chief complaint was that MedTech is slow to fix, or update things. She thinks it is still a good system however.

She gives the example of immunization schedules. Whenever their's an update on an immunization 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 is 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.

Using the 'Query Builder' functionality is also annoying. Query builder lets you find out stastics about your patient population, for example 'How many of our 26 year old patients smoke'. Their is a huge list of queries to choose from, but there is no way to filter or quickly find the option you want - other than scrolling through all of the choices. You cant even jump to a specific letter in the list, such as the A's

Web based systems are very slow for them. They use