ORBIS: Built From The Ground Up To Support Clinical Workflows.

When developing an Electronic Medical Record (EMR), does it matter if developers start from the point-of-view of hospital clinicians or from the perspective of hospital administrators?

With many enterprise-level computing solutions, the starting point doesn’t really matter, the end result can equally support multiple users and priorities. EMRs are different because the goal is to enable better patient care, by making up-to-date patient information available at all points of care and streamlining the work of physicians, EMRs need to take clinical needs as the overarching priority.

The truth is that a lot of hospital information systems are administratively and billing-focused, rather than care-centred focused. When the design of the EMR is based on supporting the delivery of care, with clinical and supporting administrative workflows as the starting point, relevant data is captured at the point of care and made available in real-time to support the planning, monitoring, reporting and billing processes. This significantly increases the value of the EMR to the organisation by making it a tool that supports the real-time management of the hospital and significantly improves the user experience of the EMR.

This does not downplay the importance of billing in the Australian and New Zealand markets, it merely highlights that clinicians should be supported to provide clinical care through the EMR and their primary focus should not be on processes that detract from their clinical foundation.

Another important factor is how easy a solution is to use. Digital products need to be intuitive and usable without deep IT knowledge and tailored to the needs of users, otherwise a lot of time is taken up with figuring out how to use the solution. The EMR needs to support the daily work of users across all departments and specialties within the healthcare facility. EMRs that require a lot of training to use, that cannot be easily customised, or that add to the administrative burden of busy professionals can lead to staff burnout and reduce the value that the EMR is expected to deliver.

Good design is important here too. An EMR that’s simple and intuitive to use, enables multi ordering or documentation on a single screen and enables mobility and access anywhere can significantly streamline the initial implementation and simplify care processes.

Supporting Clinical Workflows

From the very beginning of the design phase, in the latest iteration of ORBIS, the Electronic Medical Record solution from Dedalus, the requirements and needs of end users are put into the focus of product development. Our development and deployment teams comprise of healthcare experts including clinicians from a range of clinical disciplines along with IT and UX experts, who start with an extensive analysis of the end user’s daily activities and the key outcomes to be delivered. The use by clinicians is at the centre of design considerations for ORBIS. The end result is an EMR designed for clinicians, by clinicians.

With ORBIS, you can design the processes in your clinic efficiently and comprehensively. This reduces expenses for administrative tasks, documentation, and coordination, increasing time for care and enabling a focus on delivering improvements in care delivery and outcomes.

The medical workflows in ORBIS optimise the interaction of medical areas with the general processes in the hospital. The coordination of the needs of doctors and nursing staff results in a qualitative improvement in patient care through the comprehensive availability of information.

In particular, the integration of care into the processes with ORBIS creates new possibilities for care, for example in care planning. This means that you are supported, both in the tasks in the very special procedures of care and in the general processes. For certain hospital areas or clinics, ORBIS offers specialist departmental solutions in which subject specific processes and documentation are integrated.

ORBIS also offers the ideal basic solution for all overarching processes in your organisation. As standard, ORBIS provides all the functions that are required to safely complete overarching tasks. But even beyond the base, there are many specialised programs and extensions.

In addition to providing comprehensive, end to end, clinical support, ORBIS has a range of ‘Add-Ons’, that automate small tasks, evaluate data, or simply accelerate certain processes. Typically, these are forms or reports that are created with the ORBIS composer or the medical query generator. In addition, the composer tool provides a ‘low code’ approach to rapidly create new clinical workflow and customisations that enable organisations to rapidly develop support for new clinical practice and process in their organisation.