A research project was established to build prototypes for integrated clinical Information systems in the Breast & Gynaecological Oncology departments of the Royal Women’s and Royal Melbourne hospitals as a potential model for improved data collection & sharing processes as well as to facilitate research. The Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Care Centre (VCCC) provided grant funds.
The iCIMS methodology was employed to execute the project in a highly agile fashion. A clinical design team from each hospital was formed to steer the design of the new prototypes with the iCIMS clinical analysts facilitating the process and providing the medium and professional advice to execute it. The teams met between 1 and 3 times a month for the period of 9 months to complete the project.
The project went through the following stages:
1. Analysis of current workflows;
2. Replication of current static screens & paper forms into the new electronic environment;
3. Identifying gaps in data collection, mainly Multi-Disciplinary Meetings (MDM);
4. Workflow design;
5. Dataflow design;
6. Repeating steps 2-5 dynamically & iteratively;
7. Designing research systems to automatically collect data;
8. User-testing & feedback.
The project achieved the target outcomes as both systems were designed to maintain the favourable workflows and functionality of the decaying systems while integrating new data collection processes, workflows, and MDMs to support patient care and staff efficiency. The project also completed development of replications of the research systems at the PMCC and demonstrated automatic transfer of data from the clinical setting to the research groups potentially eliminating a significant amount of the manual labour required to gather data. User testing of the systems was completed successfully with quantitative and qualitative feedback reflecting favourable benchmark times required to complete user tasks and general satisfaction of users.