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SA Health Wins South Australian iAward for Healthcare Integration Using InterSystems Technology

Announcement posted by InterSystems 01 Aug 2016

Central Integration Solution Replaces Five Hospital-Based Interface Software Engines to Facilitate State-wide Electronic Patient Record

SYDNEY, Australia – 1 August, 2016 – InterSystems, a global leader in health information technology, today announced that the integration team from SA Health, the South Australia public health body, has won the South Australian iAward in the Public Sector and Government category for its state-wide healthcare integration solution based on InterSystems technology


The key goal of the iAwards – facilitated by the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) – is to discover, recognise and reward the ICT innovations that have the potential to have, or are already having, a positive impact on the community.


Steven Korossy, EPAS Integration Manager for SA Health, said the performance of the system has been “fantastic” and “far beyond expectations.” He attributed this to both the way the HIB has been engineered to take advantage of the InterSystems platform’s rapid and flexible interface development capabilities, and the performance of the integration platform. “The end result is we have a very efficient system that is running at only 2.5% of capacity despite servicing the whole state and processing over 50 million messages a year.”


Known as the Health Information Broker (HIB), the solution facilitates a state-wide electronic patient record by integrating over 200 applications across all South Australian metropolitan public hospitals and seven of the state’s regional public hospitals.


The centralised HIB replaced five separate instances of a legacy interface engine within the state’s metropolitan public hospitals. This has accelerated the introduction of new healthcare systems across South Australia, including the new Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) and Enterprise Pathology Laboratory Information System (EPLIS).


The solution also performs data integrity checks on all system-to-system messages. These ensure, for example, that test results reported by public services like SA Pathology match up with the correct patient in a hospital’s clinical systems. Messages that fail a patient identity test are stopped and automatically reported to SA Health’s data quality team for investigation and resolution.


The HIB is based on InterSystems rapid connectivity platform, used by health and care enterprises – including three of Australia’s seven state and territory health departments – to overcome the limitations of traditional integration engines.


The enterprise approach taken by SA Health transforms all healthcare information into a standardised HL7 message as it passes between different systems. This means healthcare applications only need to be integrated once with the HIB, and new integrations can be developed quickly and within budget.


“Our approach simplifies the whole exercise of implementing new systems and maintaining information in existing systems,” said Korossy. “The old way would have been to embark on a long, hard, expensive project building a point-to-point solution from the ground up. Now we usually quote for about 25 days, and that includes our change management process as well.”


The InterSystems-based solution has resulted in significant cost savings and improvements in service quality. With the previous interfacing systems, outages of three hours or more were not uncommon. The new solution – which includes a primary and a fail-over server – has only been unavailable for six minutes in the last six months, and that was caused by the introduction of a new network storage system.


“InterSystems is delighted to see the SA Health integration team receive public recognition for its innovative approach to healthcare integration,” said Kerry Stratton, InterSystems Managing Director, Asia Pacific. “They have laid the foundation for both a state-wide electronic patient record and a connected approach to healthcare delivery, and we wish them luck in the upcoming National iAwards.”


About InterSystems


InterSystems is the information engine that powers some of the world’s most important applications. In healthcare, finance, government, and other sectors where lives and livelihoods are at stake, InterSystems has been a strategic technology provider since 1978. InterSystems is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), with offices worldwide, and its software products are used daily by millions of people in more than 100 countries. For more information, visit InterSystems.com.au.


About SA Health


SA Health is committed to protecting and improving the health of all South Australians through leadership in health reform in the provision of public health services, health and medical research, policy development and planning, with an increased focus on wellbeing, illness prevention, early intervention and quality care. Visit www.sahealth.sa.gov.au