Post by Health Support Services (WA health system)

“At 6:38am, we all burst into applause as we saw the first alphanumeric Visit Number, AA000001, come in from the Fiona Stanley Hospital Emergency Department.” 👏   Every time you go to the hospital, be it to the emergency room or an outpatient appointment, you are assigned a webPAS Visit Number.     You’ll never need to think about it, but it’s working hard behind the scenes helping to manage patient records, admission and discharge, outpatient appointments and wait lists.    Until recently, the webPAS Visit Number consisted of eight numbers (eg. 12345678). However, the system was quickly approaching the highest possible value of 99999999 and webPAS was predicted to lose its ability to generate numbers in coming months, which would have caused problems for the applications that relied on that Visit Number generation.    HSS A/Chief Information Officer Anthony Lenzarini emphasised the impressive volume of applications impacted by the change in the webPAS Visit Number format.    “This change touched almost every application across the WA Health digital landscape, including biomedical systems, impacting more than 1,000 applications,” Tony said.    "Not only did the field need to change in webPAS, but we needed to ensure every other application could accept the new format without disrupting patient care,” Project Manager Gary Tindale explained.    On 22 April at 6:30am, the project team gathered for go-live and subsequent monitoring of WA Health’s application, which went smoothly.    The project, the culmination of months of hard work and preparation, is a great example of the ways that HSS supports the WA health system, in unseen but essential ways, to keep things running smoothly without disrupting patient care. #HSSImpact #TheHSSDifference #Healthcare #ICT #WAHealth