ENTERPRISE PATIENT ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM

Mr SIBBONS (Mitchell) (14:25): My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. Minister, how will the Enterprise Patient Administration System (EPAS) revolutionise health care in South Australia?

The Hon. J.D. HILL (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Ageing, Minister for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Minister for the Arts) (14:25): I am really pleased to be able to inform the house about how the EPAS, or the Enterprise Patient Administration System, is working. It will provide the foundation for delivering South Australia's statewide electronic health record. It will provide a foundation for health care in our state for the next generation or two. The technology places our hospitals and healthcare sites at the very forefront of advances in e-health technology in Australia, and indeed the world.

EPAS is an integrated real-time clinical information system that will provide clinicians with faster access to the patient information they need to make their decisions—particularly life-saving decisions. It will give clinicians access from anywhere, allowing them to monitor patient data and check test results at any time.

EPAS will streamline and standardise clinical workflows and enable accurate and consolidated patient information to be available to the clinicians. The intention is that this technology will provide increased clinical efficiencies, thus assisting our department to absorb the forecast increase in activity due to our changing population profile.

From a patient perspective, EPAS will enable safer and more efficient and effective patient care, with a medical record that is accessible immediately at the time of treatment. That means all information that is known about the patient will be available. Their histories will not have to be repeated. If the patient is unconscious, all that information can be accessed.

This will save a lot of time, for patients will not have to constantly repeat their medical history. I know patients who regularly go to hospitals resent that. It will improve patient safety, with healthcare professionals being able to move across various sciences. It also means that healthcare professionals will spend less time on paperwork and be able to spend more time with the patients.

The work we have done over the past decade to centralise governance and ICT systems has given us the capacity to implement this scheme. In 2009, the government approved the careconnect.sa strategy, centralising and standardising SA Health ICT and creating a consolidated and integrated ICT environment. This work laid the foundation for the establishment of EPAS as a statewide program, whereby all SA Health sites and services are required to participate in order to create a statewide electronic health record.

The government has invested $408 million over the next 10 years to create EPAS for SA Health. This will also cover future design and support of the system over the next 10 years. The rollout is currently planned to commence in March next year at the Noarlunga hospital and the GP Plus Super Clinic precinct. It will then be rolled out progressively to all remaining metropolitan hospitals and co-located health services on a hospital site, including Glenside, all metropolitan GP Plus Health Care Centres and Super Clinics, SA Ambulance Service headquarters, and two country hospitals—Port Augusta and Mount Gambier—by the end of 2014. SA Health has also purchased an enterprise-wide licence that will eventually enable—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.D. HILL: I note the interjections from the deputy leader, who is the neophyte shadow minister. If he wants to ask me questions, I would be delighted to answer every one of them, in an ordinary fashion, Madam Speaker. The final point I would make is that SA Health has purchased an enterprise-wide licence that will eventually enable rollout of EPAS to all remaining healthcare sites over future years.