Sunrise Electronic Medical Record

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (14:49): My question is to the Minister for Health and Wellbeing. Can the minister provide an update on this government's recent investments in digital health services for the regions?

The Hon. C.J. PICTON (Kaurna—Minister for Health and Wellbeing) (14:50): I thank the member for Giles for his question. As I mentioned to the house yesterday, I spent some time last week with the member for Giles and the member for Stuart in regional South Australia, particularly visiting Whyalla, Hawker, the new Leigh Creek Health Service and also Kimba hospital, which is the 71^st public hospital in the state that I have had the pleasure of visiting.

While I was in Kimba, we had a hook-up with the team at Coober Pedy Hospital because, at the same time, the team at the Coober Pedy Hospital were completing the sign-on and the switch-on for the last public hospital in South Australia to be connected to our electronic medical record system and we were able to congratulate them on that incredible effort. That means that as well as our metropolitan hospitals, we have now connected 77 hospitals and different health services across country South Australia to our electronic health record system.

This means that South Australia is now the first state in the country to have an electronic medical record system in every metro and regional hospital right across the state. This is going to be particularly important for patients right across the state. Their medical records will be able to be accessed by their clinicians a lot easier, they can get access to the records when they have gone between different hospitals—between metro and country—and it adds an additional level of security and particularly medication safety, etc., around those medical records.

There has been a team of some 80 people who have been involved in this effort of the rollout through the past two years. It has been a remarkable effort. Through the course of this rollout, some 1,198 patient beds have now been connected to the electronic medical record system. The team has trained 5,627 staff across our regional health networks through 1,800 different classes that they have run. We have rolled out 825 new workstations on wheels and 247 laptops to make sure that those regional hospitals are able to be connected.

This means that clinicians will have immediate access to the full medical history for patients, no matter where they have been treated in our system before. Patients won't need to provide their full medical history, they can be transferred faster from regional hospitals to metro hospitals if they need it, and specialists in metro hospitals can have real-time access to patient care in terms of their information.

This has been a big effort. When we came to government, there wasn't any budgeting or plan to connect our regional hospitals. We provisioned $31 million to make sure that happened. I am able particularly to tell the Treasurer that we delivered that on budget and within two years; there are not many IT projects that have been delivered on budget, but this has been a huge effort. I would particularly like to thank Wayne Champion, the CEO of the Riverland Mallee Coorong Local Health Network, who has led this project and had oversight of it for all our regional health networks across the state. It has been delivered in under two years, so a relatively rapid period of time.

Right across the state now this is connected and it is going to lead to improvements for patients. It is a big change from the system that we had before, a system called Chiron, which was a very clunky system. It was a system that, in fact, the previous government had to go to court to argue that we should still be able to keep it running against the supplier who wanted to stop it running. That is how old that system was—imagine a Commodore 64-type system—so this is a big leap forward. It is going to improve patient care and South Australia is ahead of the rest of the nation in having this interconnected health system now.