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WHAT'S NEW |
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The first week of July was a busy one with three customers completing major implementations. Alzheimer's Australia went live with their Australia-wide implementation, completing a six month project to migrate all states and territories from the previous system onto a single tcm 7 database using the new jurisdictions feature to manage the specific requirements of each state. Ballarat Community Health went live with the new Community and Womens Health and Alcohol and Drug modules so that tcm 7 is now used for all key community programs provided by the service. Merri Community Health completed their upgrade from Release 6 and implementation of the program management module within their brokerage and care respite services. Congratulations to these organisations for successfully managing the transition to tcm 7. We are pleased to welcome a number of new organisations to the tcm 7 user community and look forward to implementing with them in the next few months.
The IHE Australia Secure Messaging Connectathon held in April 2010 showed that DCA is one of only 3 vendors to achieve certification to the Australian Technical Specification: ATS 5822:2010 – eHealth Secure Message Delivery as both a sender and a receiver. Testing was performed by the Australian Healthcare Messaging Laboratory (AHML) on behalf of IHE. Click here to view the results of the testing. The IHE Connectathon is the healthcare IT industry's only large-scale interoperability testing event where systems exchange information with complementary systems from multiple vendors.
DCA has entered into an agreement to acquire Ballarat based ArgusConnect, leaders in secure document exchange between GPs, specialists, allied health practices and health services. In a separate arrangement, DCA is in the process of taking responsibility for the Connectingcare service directory an e-referral solution used by 19 Victorian primary care partnerships (PCPs). "Our objective will be to improve interoperability between tcm 7, Argus, Connectingcare and collaborate with other software vendors to facilitate exchange of referrals, notifications, discharge summaries and other electronic documents", said Peter Young, DCA's General Manager Health & Community Services. "Our vision is to build upon the emerging open interoperability standards as developed by the National e-Health Transition Authority (NeHTA)" to improve communication between health, community care and aged care providers and thereby generate improved efficiencies in healthcare service delivery."
Ballarat Community Health has decided to upgrade to tcm 7 with expanded reach across all major program areas supported by their organisation. The system will provide a single solution for clinical services, counselling, mental health, housing assistance and nursing, and group activities. Development with DCA will ensure statutory reporting compliance for the major state and federal funding bodies. The system will also facilitate secure e-referral between the community health service and other organisations within the Grampians region. The plan is to have all services running in production by July 2010. "The enhanced system will consolidate client records from a number of existing applications and ad hoc systems into a single enterprise application that will enable us to better deliver services to clients into the future", said Robyn Reeves, CEO.
A new national information system to support the delivery of care to people suffering from dementia will be implemented in all states and terrtories during 2010. DCA been contracted by Alzheimer's Australia to implement tcm 7 as a national database, including migration of data from the existing application. "What we have embarked upon will change the client experience, deliver more client time and provide a foundation for future national collaboration and unity", said Roger Parenzee, project manager for the Alzheimer's Australia project. The new application will support service specific dementia assessment, management of individual and group services, and incorporate a new national dementia reporting system.
DCA has been awarded Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status in recognition of the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies in the following areas:
At the Health Informatics Conference (HIC 2009) in Canberra in August 2009, DCA participated in the IHE Interoperability Showcase, demonstrating interconnectivity between DCA’s products and those of other vendors. The Showcase was sponsored by the Integrating the HealthCare Enterprise (IHE) organisation. The live demonstrations to conference attendees showed:
Other vendors participating in the Interoperability Showcase included ArgusConnect, Medical Objects, ConnectingCare, Ocean Informatics and the Grampians Health Information and Communications Technology Alliance. The demonstration showed that vendors are prepared to co-operate in developing to interoperability standards, and gave an insight into the future of electronic referral and secure message exchange. The technical work was lead by Steve Toal, DCA’s Director of Development, and Brian Postlethwaite, DCA Solutions Architect (pictured below).
DCA are pleased to announce availability for shipment of the new tcm 7. This first public release of the service delivery management software for aged and community care is the culmination of more two years work by DCA’s product team and in-house programmers. This wasn’t just another “upgrade”. The project has involved converting the functionality available in the existing The Care Manager software to a completely new programming platform. The project provided the opportunity to rethink how existing features could re-engineered in tcm 7 to provide improved performance, increased scalability, improved reporting, system auditing, improved document management, and a better user experience. Existing users of The Care Manager will find a number of functional enhancements. Organisations that broker services will find a new process to reconcile purchase invoices, report on budgets and accruals, and extract transactions to the financial system. Those who roster staff will find a completely redesigned calendar function incorporating client diaries and staff rosters. Those who manage the clinical needs of clients will find the combination of events switchboard, survey designer and data warehousing a comprehensive solution to integrated screening, specialist assessment, care planning and outcomes reporting. In addition the new tcm 7 boasts a number of new features not available in previous versions of the software. These include new switchboards, enhanced diary and rostering features, improved financial features and a consistent, easier-to-learn and customise user-interface. More than 30 organisations throughout Australia have been exploring pre-release versions of tcm 7 since 2008 using a DCA-supplied demo databases. User workshops were undertaken in Victoria, NSW, SA and Queensland to demonstrate the new product and garner user feedback. DCA is pleased to announce that eight new community organisations have committed to tcm 7 since the beginning of May and, in addition, we are finalising negotiations for two nationwide implementations that will involve over 1200 users. Specialised Planning for tcm 7 training sessions have been underway for existing users to prepare for a successful transition to the new software at their organisation. The initial sessions in Sydney and Melbourne have been fully subscribed and we encourage existing users to attend this course over the next few months. Come along and see tcm 7 – the new face of care.
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