To improve capacity to provide care for COVID-19 patients, hospitals across the country have taken the unprecedented emergency action of cancelling most elective surgeries. Doing so has reduced the use of valuable PPE and freed up much needed hospital beds normally occupied by elective surgical patients.
Cancelling elective surgeries is a difficult, but prudent, course of action during a pandemic emergency. Unfortunately, doing so has created and continues to create a backlog of patients waiting for necessary procedures and surgeries.
Once elective surgery is recommenced, likely in a staged approach, the challenge will be optimizing the allocation of operating theatre time and managing the existing and new patients on the waiting lists.
The Novari ATC software system can help manage waiting lists at the surgeon, department, hospital, regional, and state levels. The software is used to ensure that every patient is tracked, scheduled, and safely prepared for surgery. It reduces last-minute surgery cancellations, thereby increasing the number of surgeries performed.
Novari ATC maximizes the throughput of patients through the operating room, improving the utilization of every minute of available surgical time by integrating with the existing operating theatre system.
Novari’s ATC software replaces paper, faxes, manual processes to provide hospitals and clinicians a transparent and efficient process.
“Once a surgeon decides that a patient requires surgery, the process for placing that patient on a public hospital waiting list is nothing short of archaic. It generally requires manual completion of a paper-based form or a digitised equivalent. The essential patient information on these forms are renown for being inadequate, insufficient or omitted. Getting correct or completed information requires considerable work for public hospital booking staff and administrative staff in surgeons’ rooms. It is a labour intensive, error prone, safety suspect and outdated process.
The Novari ATC surgical wait list management system replaces paper, faxes and manual processes to provide hospitals and clinicians with a transparent and efficient process. It manages waiting lists seamlessly from the surgeon’s rooms through to the operating theatre. Every patient is tracked, scheduled and safely prepared for surgery.
In these challenging times with the backlog of surgery due to COVID-19, an efficient software system like that of Novari would provide considerable efficiencies and heightened safety.
I have seen the results of this software in action in busy hospital settings and discussed its benefits with surgeons and administrative staff. I have no doubts it would considerably improve the surgical booking processes in many hospitals in Australia.
Better for surgeons, better for hospitals, better for patients.”
–Professor Donald G. MacLellan, BSc MD MBA FRACS MAICD Former NSW State-Wide Director of Surgery & Retired Chief Executive Agency for Clinical Innovation NSW
Where Novari’s ATC software has been deployed in Canada surgeons, hospitals, and health authorities have the ability and option to respond to the massive pandemic backlog by managing cases collaboratively and fairly. This option is often not feasible or possible without Novari ATC.
The Novari ATC solution can be implemented quickly at individual hospitals or across regional health districts as they prepare to recommence surgery. Rapid deployment is made possible as the Novari ATC system is provided as Software as a Service and is hosted exclusively in Microsoft Azure Australian data centres. Novari ATC complements and integrates to existing hospital surgical scheduling systems (e.g., Cerner, Picis, Meditech, SIS, etc.).
Novari Health has been called upon by hospitals and ministries of health to help during the pandemic. Our Novari eVisit virtual care technology is being used to allow patients to virtually see their primary care physician as well as see physicians from hospital, COVID-19 assessment centre, and provincial virtual “waiting rooms”.
The Novari ATC surgical wait list management system has been leveraged by surgeons, hospitals, and regional health authorities to manage the overnight cancellations of elective surgeries. When elective surgeries resume, Novari ATC will be used to manage the backlog and provide needed care to many thousands of Canadians.
About Novari Health
Novari Health designs, builds, and implements award-winning cloud-based, enterprise scale software solutions that improve access to care, coordination of care, and the delivery of healthcare services. The Novari Access to Care software platform includes virtual care, eReferral, central intake, workflow management, surgical waitlist management, and medical imaging requisition management modules. With offices in Sydney, Boston, Toronto, Kingston, and Vancouver, the Novari team is comprised of physicians, nurses, former hospital administrators, software architects, software developers, project managers, certified professionals in Health Information and Management Systems, and client support. Novari Health is a Microsoft Partner, with software solutions hosted on the Microsoft Azure Canadian and Australian cloud data centres, for security and scalability. Novari Health has been independently assessed by BSI against internationally recognized standards showing our commitment to quality and assurance and is ISO 27001 Information Security Management System certified.