The Epic Digital team have had a super productive 2015, it’s hard to believe that we went into Christmas 2014 as a team of 3 beginning to scope out our initial product builds.
Over the course of the year the team has grown to 9 people in Brisbane, plus our Israeli development team from Sela in Tel Aviv. People based at the Icon Group head office in South Brisbane are now well used to seeing the Digital team grouped around a screen late in the working day for their regular Skype meetings into Tel Aviv, and we’ve definitely established that geographic diversity provides no barrier to collaborative partnerships.
With our Medication Manager product poised to go live early across the entire Epic Aged Care Pharmacy business in the New Year, enabling real time 24/7 access to medication profiles and information to the thousands of elderly patients that we provide pharmacy services for, the team have also been hard at work building products designed to solve the pain points of our other business units.
One of these is Chartflow, which was originally designed for our pharmacies participating in the paperless claiming trial underway in private hospitals around the country. Our pharmacists briefed the Digital team on the need for a product that would allow them to capture an image of the medication chart at ward level, annotate the requirements and send through to the dispensary for actioning.
The Digital team expanded on this to build a product that not only met this brief, but also incorporated workflow management tools, allowing at a glance visibility of workloads and waiting orders.
You know you’re onto a winner when a product goes viral, with team members becoming passionate advocates and champing at the bit to expand the planned scope of the pilot. We worked closely with that initial pharmacy site and those product champions to refine Chartflow even further, and we’re now rolling it out at all of our hospital pharmacy locations around the country.
It’s not only transforming our hospital pharmacy workflows, but improving the safety and efficiency of medication supply by eliminating the opportunity for transcription errors and reducing turnaround times for pharmacy orders.
Given the success of Chartflow in the hospital environment, we’re now busy modifying it for use by our aged care facility customers and looking forward to piloting this in early 2016.
It’s been a huge year for Epic Digital, Emma has built a great team and our initial products are really adding value to the operational teams across the group – as exhibited when Hanwen, the lead developer of Chartflow won the Innovation category in the peer nominated Epic You awards last month.
Work has already started on the next phase of our product development – taking the known data that we have in our systems and blending that with the unknown as we incorporate feeds from sensors and wearables. Our purpose is to deliver exceptional healthcare, and 2016 is going to see us advance on that goal in a big way.