Prescribing cancer treatment at South Australia’s flagship hospital Royal Adelaide Hospital has gone digital.
Electronic cloud-based system iQemo is now live at RAH, where the Cancer Day Center delivers 17,000 cancer treatments to South Australians each year.
iQemo, provided by Altera Digital Health, also offers scheduling, delivery, chemotherapy administration and comprehensive reporting. It is also integrated into the hospital’s existing Sunrise EMR, also provided by Altera.
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT
The implementation is a first at RAH, said Dr Charlotte Sale, Acting Cancer Program Director at Central Adelaide Local Health Network. iQemo “(replaces) a paper-based system previously used across the state.”
“This has significantly improved chemotherapy prescribing, streamlining our processes to improve patient safety and the timely delivery of evidence-based care,” she said. Healthcare IT news.
The electronic system is now used by more than 450 RAH physicians and healthcare administrators to manage more than a thousand patients, Dr. Sale noted.
According to the non-governmental organization Cancer Council SA, approximately 30 new cases of cancer are diagnosed in South Africa every day. About 3,800 South Australians die from cancer every year, with lung cancer accounting for the most deaths.
THE GREATER CONTEXT
This digital implementation at RAH is part of a national program to digitalise the prescribing of cancer treatments. In 2021, SA Health has a contract with Allscripts to provide the state’s Enterprise Chemotherapy Prescribing System. The project aims to implement a consistent and standardized systemic cancer therapy process in South Africa. One of the main objectives is to minimize the risk of dosing errors to improve patient safety.
It made the first went live in November last year at Lyell McEwin Hospital and Mount Gambier and Districts Health Service. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital has also fully adopted the electronic solution.
The project aims to complete the iQemo rollout across all 21 public hospitals in South Africa by the end of 2025.