their hands up to be involved in subsequent stages of
the project,” Mr. Maudsley says.
Like many IT projects in the industry, electronic
collection and transmission of sensitive patient
information raised security challenges. To ensure
it wouldn’t jeopardize patient privacy, the project
team collaborated closely with legal advisers to
identify security requirements early on. One piece
of advice the team received, for instance, was to
build email verification into the system’s workflow
in order to gain patients’ consent before communicating with them electronically about their health.
Although paper is still part of life at BSV, the
transition into the organization’s purely electronic
future has begun. As of May, 30 percent of patients
were booking appointments online and 40 percent
were receiving documents via email—which translates into annual postage savings of AU$100,000.
Mr. Maudsley is confident benefits will continue to
accrue to both the organization and the women it
serves. “We need a system that allows us to perform
our duties as efficiently as possible so we can grow
with our population,” he says. “This system will help
us do that.” PM
“If they were only available at 8 p.m., we’d make
ourselves available. We also did a lot of online
[meetings] so people could just dial in to a telecon-
ference and look at the design as we described it.”
A similar strategy for boosting participation
worked during the implementation phase. “We
had to train approximately 600 staff [radiologists,
radiographers, nurse counselors and administra-
tors] across the state in a new version of software,
or a new workflow. Victoria is a very large place
and I don’t have 50 trainers, so we had to think
carefully about how to efficiently train that many
people,” Mr. Maudsley says. His team turned to
e-learning solutions to remotely train his staff in
virtual classrooms to complement traditional class-
room training.
A turning point in the project proved to be engaging radiologists. “Once everyone knew that the clinical leaders were engaged and complimentary about
the solution we’d delivered, other stakeholders put
“Every time a woman
came in we’d need to
pay for that file to be
retrieved from our
archive. If we
could eliminate
that expense,
we could
redirect
the cost
toward
screening
more
women.”
—Greg Maudsley,
BreastScreen Victoria,
Carlton, Australia
A radiologist reviews breast-cancer-screening images.
