Forensic Hospital Patient Management Solution (PIRC2)

A solution using Meridian's intelligent data management engine (IDME) for NSW Justice Health

Meridian was asked to quote for helping to develop a visitor management system for the new forensic hospital at Long Bay Gaol. Meridian proposed to use its IDME as the tool to develop this system. As JusticeHealth already owned a license for unlimited use of this technology, they only required some extra concurrent user licenses.

Introduction

Forensic Hospital

The Justice Health Forensic Hospital is a high security mental health facility for adults and adolescents. It provides specialist mental health care for people found not guilty by reason of mental illness, mentally disordered offenders, those unfit to plead, or those at risk of offending.

The Hospital is a 135 bed facility located outside the Long Bay Prison Complex site. The hospital has three distinct Units: Mental Health Unit, Medical Surgical Unit, Aged Care and Rehabilitation Unit.

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Development of a new Patient Information Management system

Based on the success of Connections, a drug and alcohol program management solution based on Meridian’s Clinixian software, Justice Health asked Meridian to help build a new patient centric information and reporting system PIRC2, for the new Forensic Hospital.

The solution was to replace the manual excel spreadsheet system which had become difficult to maintain and couldn’t integrate with the patient administration System or patient scheduling systems.

Mike Mortimer, a project officer from Justice Health, with Meridian’s training and help was able to develop a comprehensive solution covering the following application areas:

Patient Details - iPM integrated

Patient demographics are automatically synchronised with the Patient Administrations system via HL7 messages.

This covers the offense history and offence sentence details.

Forensic Hospital Episodes

Appointment management—iPM integration

Clinical appointments in iPM are synchronised with those in PIRC2

Sentence Administration

• Gate leave
• Patient clinical details
• Court appearances
• Offense history
• Release orders

Mental Health Act Administration

Administration of the mental health act includes recording and maintaining, forensic and civilian patient details, correctional patient details and the results of mental health reviews by the Mental Health Tribunal.

Patient Security

The new system also supports patient and visitor security. This involves recording associations between the patient and potential visitors. It also enables recording of security incidents, leave events and visits and visitors.

The system indicates conditions relating to visits to a patient by a specific person, eg banned, allowed under supervision etc.

Benefits of the new System

The old system involved one fulltime person just to enter the data which was never fully up to date. The new system is maintained in real-time by the hospital staff.

Because the new system (PIRC2) is built with Meridian's Clinixian software which uses archetype modelling, it allowed the developer to define the data rules and reports. The Clinixian stores these as metadata (called a model) in a database. This enabled the Justice Health to encapsulate their business knowledge and maintain it with little need for IT support.

Mike Mortimer commented that a significant benefit of new system was that it eliminated duplicate data entry because the patient demographic and visit data is automatically synchronised using HL7 messaging with 'the Patient Administration system. He also said it was much more patient oriented.

PIRC2 also pioneered the use of HL7 scheduling messages for patient appointments'. Mike said that, as far as he could discover, these messages have not been used before in any other NSW Health system.

Mike also pointed out that a major benefit of the Clinixian archetype technology is that it allows Justice Health to keep the system in line with changing requirements. He said the old system was inflexible and difficult to maintain. He said he now gets a lot of requests from hospital staff for additional reports and information.