Melbourne Health – Breast Cancer Service
Melbourne Health has upgraded its Clinical & Research information management system used by the shared Breast Cancer service of The Royal Melbourne and The Royal Women’s Hospitals. The new system, installed by Innovative Clinical Information Management Systems (iCIMS) is also designed to allow easy access from other institutions within the Parkville precinct.
The iCIMS system (RUTH II) is a full Clinical Information System (CIS) which enables the two hospitals to track the patient journey, manage the Multidisciplinary Team Meetings and transparently share patient information.
iCIMS used its advanced technology to enable a concept it calls Immediate Adaptability to very quickly prototype a system tailored specifically to the needs, workflows and outcomes required by the two hospitals.
One facet of Immediate Adaptability that sets iCIMS developed systems apart is the speed of user-driven system design changes. This speed, in turn, allows iCIMS to deploy a unique installation model; once the initial handover is completed, the client has three months to request system design changes without additional cost. The result is a highly tailored, fit for purpose solution that has overwhelmingly high user buy-in from senior clinicians, nurses, data administration and ancillary services.
Professor Bruce Mann – Director of Breast Tumour Stream, Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre (VCCC) has seen the effects of iCIMS’ Immediate Adaptability within his team; the MDM team has been very impressed that changes suggested during the MDM one week had been implemented and operational the following week.
As an example of the immediacy of changes, with the RUTH II system, there were 98 design changes requested by the clinical users as a result of them using the system in a live environment in the first three months. Of those changes, 93 have been delivered already with an average turnaround time of 3 days without any system downtime.
As well as the core functionality, the system has additional modules that produce:
- End of treatment summaries and outcomes
- A survivorship component
- Breast audit data exports
RUTH II has been designed to be fully expandable into other tumour streams and other sites within the Parkville precinct and is already remotely accessible from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (PMCC).
