NSW Health has appointed health technology provider Epic to work with eHealth NSW and NSW Health Pathology to deliver a Single Digital Patient Record (SDPR) that will enhance the care patients receive at NSW public hospitals.

NSW Min­is­ter for Health the Hon. Ryan Park, MP announced the SDPR on 19 Octo­ber 2023, giv­ing the green light to uni­fy­ing health care tech­nolo­gies across NSW to pro­vide patients with improved hos­pi­tal care and pro­vide greater sup­port for busy health care providers.

Cre­at­ing a sin­gle statewide pathol­o­gy lab­o­ra­to­ry infor­ma­tion sys­tem is an impor­tant part of the SDPR that will pro­vide health pro­fes­sion­als with secure real-time access to pathol­o­gy results for their patients, no mat­ter which NSW pub­lic hos­pi­tal they are treat­ed in.

“This excit­ing trans­for­ma­tion pro­gram will improve patient care across NSW by enabling a high­ly secure, holis­tic and inte­grat­ed view of the care a patient receives across the NSW pub­lic health sys­tem,” said Vanes­sa Janis­sen, Chief Exec­u­tive of NSW Health Pathology.

“This means that if some­one from Dub­bo, for exam­ple, needs urgent hos­pi­tal care in Syd­ney, the treat­ing doc­tors will have imme­di­ate access to their med­ical his­to­ry and diag­nos­tic results and can make fast, informed deci­sions about their care”, she said.

SDPR will also enhance impor­tant dig­i­tal inte­gra­tions between our Foren­sic and Ana­lyt­i­cal Sci­ence Ser­vice, NSW Police, and the Coro­ner as well as across our pathol­o­gy net­work to help improve time­li­ness, informed deci­sion mak­ing and out­comes for the jus­tice system.

NSW Health Pathol­o­gy Chief Med­ical Infor­ma­tion Offi­cer Dr Stephen Braye said pathol­o­gy plays a vital role in the clin­i­cal diag­no­sis and treat­ment of patients and hav­ing this infor­ma­tion on hand fast is important.

“It’s why a sin­gle pathol­o­gy lab­o­ra­to­ry infor­ma­tion sys­tem is a core fea­ture of the SDPR ini­tia­tive – to ensure doc­tors can secure­ly access real-time pathol­o­gy results for patients no mat­ter which NSW pub­lic hos­pi­tal they’re being treat­ed in,” Dr Braye said.

Epic is a world leader in dig­i­tal health tech­nol­o­gy and will work with us to devel­op the SDPR, which will also include a sin­gle elec­tron­ic med­ical record (eMR) and one patient admin­is­tra­tion sys­tem (PAS).

Work on the design and build of the SDPR will soon begin and is sched­uled to go live at Hunter New Eng­land Local Health Dis­trict. It is then planned to be rolled out across the state in phases.

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