BC implements first province-wide cardiac info system

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 55, No. 7, September 2013, Pages 337,339 News

Cardiac Services BC, an agency of the Provincial Health Services Authority (PHSA), has implemented the first province-wide cardiac information system in Canada to support clinical care, quality assurance and improvement, and outcome-based research. 

The Heart Information System (HEARTis) uses a single point of entry on a web-based platform. It tracks all of a patient’s current and future cardiac procedures, from registry on the wait list to procedure completion and follow-up, regardless of where they are performed in the province. 

HEARTis replaces the BC Cardiac Registry, a 20-year-old system that required manual data entry, resulting in delays in entering and accessing patient information. The HEARTis project team included multiple vendors and nearly 100 cardiologists, cardiovascular surgeons, nurses, senior administrators, and staff from privacy, risk, and IT departments from all five regional health authorities in BC. 

HEARTis improves access to critical health-related information and eliminates the need to manually track down and transfer patient records. The system also standardizes processes and reporting, reducing the time to enter a cardiac surgery report into the system from 20 to 30 minutes in the old registry to 10 to 20 minutes using HEARTis. The time to send out clinical reports to copied physicians went from 7 days to 2 days, and the time for finalized clinical reports to be entered went from 7 days to 1 day.

HEARTis has been implemented at Royal Jubilee Hospital (Victoria), St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver), Vancouver General Hospital, Kelowna General Hospital, and Royal Colum­bian Hospital (New Westminster).

. BC implements first province-wide cardiac info system . BCMJ, Vol. 55, No. 7, September, 2013, Page(s) 337,339 - News.


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