Nexuzhealth pro for hospitals: what to expect

Nexuzhealth pro for hospitals is the long-term replacement of our centralised electronic health record: Clinical Workstation (CWS). Rien Dieryckx, Product Manager Hospital Solutions at nexuzhealth, is giving us a sneak preview and insightful information on the consultation flow.

The foundation for the transition from CWS to nexuzhealth pro, the cloud based electronic health record (EHR) for hospitals, is being laid. "Nexuzhealth is working very hard on this process and is planning a phased roll-out," says Rien Dieryckx. "To start with, we’re going to implement consultation flows and take a closer look at the core hospital functionalities. The first phase concerns the outpatient clinics, hospitals and rehabilitation centres as they are the existing CWS customers. Obviously, we’re not starting from scratch because the core functionalities, login screens and appointment system we developed for the primary care caregivers’ application are the perfect foundation."

Consultation workflows

The consultation workflows are a significant improvement. "Appointments can still be booked in the familiar way of course, but an intuitive appointment planner, which provides a straightforward step by step guide when you enter the correct parameters, will also be introduced," explains Rien Dieryckx. "For example, a single appointment starts with the 'appointment type', which is a new approach. Predefined time slots are no longer used in nexuzhealth pro for hospitals. We  will work with flexible appointments, which hospital IT staff can configure entirely independently.

A patient is added (based on national register number, patient identification number or via integration with RN Consult) and an appointment is selected from the list of suggestions. The end user subsequently gets a clear and recognisable view with daily, weekly and monthly overviews. Clicking on an appointment allows you to make changes or to navigate to the patient record."

Consultation view

Specialists open the so-called consultation view to start a consultation, which has the same look and feel as the overviews general practitioners see today in nexuzhealth pro doctor, because development is being done on the same platform.

An example of the new consultation view in nexuzhealth pro for hospitals

The entry of the fields in this view is intuitive: reason for the visit (headache, chest pain, etc.), objective parameters (height, weight, blood pressure, etc.), etc. Certain parameters can be set to mandatory. It’s even possible to provide more details, for example whether a patient’s blood pressure was taken while sitting down or lying down. All parameters are patient-specific to simplify any data extractions at a later time. It’s also interesting that, based on international standards (icd9, icd10 and snomed codes), you can receive suggestions from patients wishing to make an appointment at the healthcare facility," Rien Dieryckx clarifies. "After the consultation, follow-up actions ensue: structured home medication prescription, for example.

Generic structure

We’ll focus a lot on user-friendliness in the future. "We’re aiming for structured reports. For example, when a patient visits a cardiologist, the fitness test is shown immediately, but not last year’s ankle fracture. Based on the input in the file, an easy-to-validate report is generated."

Step by step migration

Switching in one go is not feasible in practical terms, which means it’s a case of integrating the different modules step by step. "Documents, a kind of document viewer showing images, reports and records, etc., is a first key element. A crucial step in the development is ensuring that a patient's identification is the same in nexuzhealth pro as in CWS.

It’s the only way that integrated care can be communicated efficiently and is why the 'Patient sync' is so important. We’ll have taken major strides in this by 2025. In terms of medication, we continue to build on medication prescriptions in the hospital, and the preparation and recording of medication by nurses. Other improvements and innovations concern uniformity, forms, questionnaires, work lists, order communication, user-friendliness, etc."

Switching from CWS to nexuzhealth pro for hospitals is not something we’re doing on our own of course. Core working groups and domain updates with our existing customers provide interesting insights. New features will be pitched to hospitals to ask for feedback and fine-tune certain functionalities. Strategic meetings with hospitals to launch a rock-solid first version of nexuzhealth pro for hospitals will also be organised.