Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

NT e-health system cleans up doctor's handwriting

Pharmacists download electronic prescriptions
Page:

The Northern Territory government has launched a new electronic prescription service that aims to reduce discrepancies caused by doctor's handwriting and improve patient care.

The million-dollar Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP) project is a product of two year's development and will provide health care agencies, including hospitals, general practitioners and aged care facilities with faster and less error prone pharmaceutical service.

Top End Division of General Practice E-health program manager, Matt Antcliff, said the project builds on the shift to e-health to minimise paper use and improve accuracy.

"Doctor's have been able to create electronic prescriptions, but they still needed to print it out and sign it," Antcliff said.

"[ETP] means the prescription can be electronically signed and sent off to be retrieved by a pharmacy from our servers, eliminating error.

"There are a lot of people admitted to hospital caused by errors in prescriptions where the wrong drug or dosage is handed out."

Prescriptions are filled out on electronic forms, encrypted, and sent to servers owned by Northern Territory Health. Pharmacies can then download the prescription and allocate medicines without having to decipher handwritten documents.

Antcliff said the encryption used reduces the risk of prescriptions being stolen.

"It is far more secure than the old method. All you basically needed to do before was steal a doctor's pad," he said.

Doctors visiting aged care facilities can use the technology to fill out prescriptions from mobile devices and send them off for collection.

Page:

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: ACT, Argus, Northern Territory Government, Wikipedia
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Why Two Thirds of Enterprise Architecture Projects Fail
    This is the conclusion of a study for the R otterdam U niversity carried out by J onathan B roer in the summer of 2008, ordered by BPM and E A software vendor IDS S cheer. B roer questioned 161 respondents from 89 organizations representing a range of industries about their vision and implementation of the enterprise architecture concept.
    Learn more »
  • Web 2.0 in the Workplace Today
    More than a decade after the term ‘Web 2.0’ was coined, many businesses are still nowhere near to taking full advantage of the collaborative technologies the term refers to. Undoubtedly, confidence is growing in relation to using tools such as Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and indeed many more organisations are using such technology now compared to even just a couple of years ago. But the fact remains that a worrying amount of businesses seem to be operating a ‘lockdown’ approach – an approach that I’m sure many Board-level staff know is simply not good for business in the long-term.
    Learn more »
  • Fixing Your Dropbox Problem - How the Right Data Protection Strategy Can Help
    It’s estimated that more than 50 million people have used public cloud storage services such as Dropbox to share and exchange files. Public cloud services are so easy to use that their openness can undermine existing IT policies regarding the transmission of confidential data. With data volumes threatening to overwhelm onsite storage, IT managers are looking to find a solution that’s affordable and secure. This paper details a simple three-step approach to helping users manage access to the public cloud without placing your data or your business at risk. Read on.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.