St Vincent’s Dialysis Unit incorporates a 4 bedded acute unit, 15 chair chronic dialysis unit, home training, CAPD and transplantation on the Fitzroy Campus, plus a 7 chair chronic satellite dialysis unit on the Kew campus.
In late 2005 St Vincent’s Dialysis implemented a comprehensive patient data management system, Clinical Vision and Exalis. This system is designed to give the staff an integrated clinical record for all patients under the care of St Vincent’s. The expectations were that Clinical Vision in conjunction with Exalis would improve dialysis data collection, generate multidisciplinary care plans, create paperless correspondence between the units and renal clinics, and allow for easy generation of reports for internal audits and ANZDATA registry.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the challenge of implementing Clinical Vision in a cross campus dialysis setting. It will cover the education of nursing, administrative and medical staff. It will discuss technical issues that had to be overcome requiring communication with England, USA and Australia over 3 different time zones. In addition it will address the difficulty in maintaining staff motivation during a long implementation period.
In hindsight errors were made and there were many setbacks but with the dedication of staff and a willingness to make it work there is finally light at the end of the tunnel.