Innovative solutions to help with the COVID-19 vaccination program continued to come thick and fast as we entered the second quarter of the year, and few were bigger than ACT Health’s solution. It went live with a full version of its new Epic EMR 18 months earlier than scheduled to help manage COVID-19 vaccinations for the ACT public health system.

While a full version of the EMR hosted on infrastructure provided by NTT is live, ACT Health only configured those parts of Epic required to manage the vaccine program as well as an online booking system using Epic’s MyChart patient portal, which has been branded as MyDHR (digital health record). Nursing staff administering the vaccines used Epic’s Rover smartphone app on Spectralink Versity handsets, with data from Epic and the territory’s iPM patient administration system then uploaded to the Australian Immunisation Register. The booking system for the ACT’s two COVID-19 mass vaccination clinics was up and running in May.