'Computer-assisted decision support tools are already a proven part of preoperative anaesthetic assessment.'
'An effective tool for generating a clinically useful and very detailed patient medical history, and for identifying perioperative issues for both anaesthetists and surgeons.'
Hospital overview
The Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH) is South Australia’s largest accredited teaching hospital, with 680 beds. The hospital offers basic training positions in internal medicine, surgery and general practice, and advanced training in a range of specialty areas.
Each year the 24-hours a day emergency department caters for 70,000 patients. The intensive care unit treats 4,000 patients. Operating theatres perform 12,000 emergency and 10,000 elective surgical procedures.
The hospital is involved in many areas of medical and health research, often in conjunction with the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science and the University of Adelaide, for which it is a major teaching hospital.
Offering one of the largest operating room services in Australia, the Royal Adelaide Hospital features 22 theatres which include ten general purpose operating rooms, two urology procedure rooms, three emergency operating rooms (24-hour coverage), two cardiothoracic operating rooms, one day surgery operating room, one eye operating room and one burns operating room.
Client: SA Health (Public Sector)
Implementation: April 2003
Modules: IntraOp, Acute Pain, Admin
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Operating Theatres: 22
Website: www.rah.sa.gov.au
The hospital’s challenge
To maintain the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s position as a global leader in medical research, a need was identified to store accurate patient records on a hospital-wide accessible database and retrieve them easily.
Getz Clinical solution
Getz Clinical was awarded the contract through a competitive tendering process and subsequently installed an early version of the IntraOp module in 22 operating theatres.
Installation included hardware (client touch screen monitors and server infrastructure), professional implementation services, training services, technical support services and configuration.
In 2009–2010, the Royal Adelaide Hospital—supported through grants provided by Getz Clinical—undertook a clinical study on the value of patient data captured during the preoperative phase of the perioperative process.
The study demonstrated that the quality of computer-aided patient assessment questionnaires was comparable to questionnaires undertaken by anaesthetists during face-to-face interviews.
The study also found that 49.5% of patients who completed a computer-aided perioperative assessment required no further pre-assessment. These patients did not require assessment at an outpatient clinic and only needed to see an anaesthetist on the day of surgery.
Overall cost savings were realised through more efficient management of anaesthesia resources.
Outcomes of the study were then incorporated into the Getz Clinical PreOp module now in use in several hospitals worldwide.
The study was awarded the best scientific paper for 2012 by the Australian journal Anaesthesia and Intensive Care.
Today the Royal Adelaide Hospital uses the Getz Clinical modules as their enterprise perioperative management system, and the data collected is used in various research and administrative improvement projects.
Download the Case Study
| File | Filetype | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Royal Adelaide Hospital Case Study | 2 MB |