Update on Last year's winners

The winner of last year's Clinician's Challenge was Maria Stapleton, a Clinical Nurse Specialist from MidCentral Health.

Maria leads a team of Clinical Nurse Specialists working with people who have been diagnosed with colorectal cancer. The patient journey for colorectal cancer patients has three phases and involves multiple referrals, information sharing and tracking.

The problem posed by Maria was the difficulty of ensuring care was delivered at the appropriate time, when multiple systems for tracking and co-ordination were used. The existing processes were laborious and time consuming.

Maria says her team had often talked about how there must be an IT way to work with tracking patients. She liked the idea of actually shaping the complexity of the role into a clinical challenge.

Twelve months later, the vendor chosen to address the problem - Orion - has developed a proposed solution. The solution is dependant on the arrival of Concerto and CRISP.

Maria says she hopes the solution will provide clearer pathways and monitoring of patients' progress, shared systems and easy access to information. She says Orion staff have been very thorough, and it is great to have a document that so comprehensively lays out the service provided by the team.

For more information about the Clinician's Challenge, see the HINZ website.

Photo below shows Dougal McKechnie and Prof Jim Warren with last year's Winner Maria Stapleton.