HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Unit

Manager: Michael Bouchard (03) 9096 5677

Role and Function

The HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project Section has a primary focus on the redevelopment of the healthCollect environment, but it is is responsible for the development and support of other health information applications and systems.
Current projects include:

1. The HealthCollect & Victorian Health Information Repositories (VHIRS) Redevelopment Project.
2. Perinatal Data Acquisition Project.
3. The Budget and Payments System (BPS.Web) Upgrade Project.
4. Stroke Management eLearning Application Development Project

The unit is also provides ongoing support re the maintenance of the current version of the Budget & Payments System (BPS.Web).

HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project

The HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project has been scoped as a staged ‘bite-sized’ project that is based on extensive customer engagement and a strong commitment to maintaining existing capability until the project deliverables are proven, fully tested and production-ready. 

The HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project relates to the broad DHS issues of data collection reform and organisational business intelligence.  The high level project goal is to establish a foundational platform that will deal with these broad issues whilst addressing current environmental deficiencies.

This project goal is consistent with the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee (PAEC) Report on DHS funding arrangements that recommended DHS develop and implement a strategy to:

• Reduce the quantity, frequency, detail and duplication of data collected from funded organisations.
• Improve the quality of data collected from funded organisations
• Share data within DHS and provide appropriate data to funded organisations.

The HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project is essentially seeking to establish a complete business architecture / end-to-end processing environment that caters for data reform / business intelligence and eradicates current negative system impacts.

The business architecture established must also cater for / align to:

• The DHS meta-data management solution.
• Leveraging the HealthSMART application suite.
• DHS Information Management (IM) principles.

The defined scope of the HealthCollect & VHIRS Redevelopment Project is to:

• Redevelop the current HealthCollect environment and health data repositories / data warehouses into a uniform data acquisition / processing framework and consolidated DHS health domain level data warehouse.
• Integrate with HealthSMART for the purpose of direct data acquisition.
• Reform / rationalise the key health data collections.
• Redevelop the Patient Records System (PRS/2) (currently hosted by PayOffice Australia P/L) and eliminate the current facility management cost.

The Budget & Payments System (BPS.Web)

The Metropolitan Health and Aged Care Services Division’s Budget and Payments System (BPS) is a business critical application used for the management of hospital budgets & funding.

BPS.Web manages a budget of approximately $6 billion.

The main features of BPS.Web are:

1. Grant and Agency Maintenance.
2. Agency Payments.
3. Enquiry & Reporting.

BPS.Web provides reports to internal and external users on a regular basis.  Access to various parts of the system is allocated to individual users.  Health services access their cash flow reports from BPS.Web via a web site. 

BPS.Web has been designed to handle Acute and sub-Acute budgets, along with Metropolitan Aged Care and Mental Health budgets.

BPS.Web has been developed in Microsoft .Net 1.1 using C#.  The intent is to upgrade to DHS’ current version of .Net in 2009/10.

The Perinatal Data Acquisition Project

The aim of the Perinatal Data Acquisition Project is:

• To deliver a data reform specification showing how the reformed perinatal collection specification can be adapted to the VINAH framework.
• To prepare advice on how that adaptation can be carried out using a non-complex data transformation application.
• To adapt the reformed perinatal data collection to the common VINAH data acquisition model.
• To enable the acquisition, storage and reporting of the reformed perinatal data collection via VINAH and existing HealthCollect infrastructure / VHIRS.

Stroke Management eLearning Application Development Project

The Stroke Care Strategy / Medical Education Sub-committee

In September 2007 DHS launched the Stroke Care Strategy for Victoria.  The purpose of this initiative is to provide a framework for the delivery of public acute and sub-acute stroke services.  The strategy aims to guide the future provision of care, in the design and delivery of stroke care service organisation, and the development of appropriate workforce to support it. 

In early 2008 it was determined that a medical education sub-committee should be formed to underpin the strategy.  The basis for this decision was to develop an evidence based medical education resource for junior medical staff.
 
The Acute Stroke Care eLearning Application Development Project

The objective of the Acute Stroke Care eLearning Application Development Project is to develop, pilot and implement a web-based multimedia medical education / eLearning application designed to enhance skills in stroke care. 

The target user group is primarily junior doctors, ED staff (medical and nursing), basic physician trainees, and general practitioners.