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Macquarie University Hospital Patient Portal 1st to Implement IFC Process

Macquarie University Hospital (MUH) is the first hospital in Australia to implement a National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) compliant online Informed Financial Consent (IFC) process with the go live of their patient portal. After years of thoroughly researching the market MUH selected the epi-me patient portal by Sydney based health tech company, EpiSoft. MUH patients who completed their pre-admission information on the portal will receive a notification to view and acknowledge their hospital estimates online. Hospital’s using epi-me also have the option to utilise the portal’s native payment gateway so patients can pay any out of pocket expenses online. This means that hospitals can focus on the comfort of the patient on the day of admission rather than needing to chase up any outstanding financial matters. 

This is the 75th hospital instance of the multi-award winning epi-me patient portal. It has been a busy 1st half of 2020 for the company with 13 hospitals going live with the portal and several major upgrades to their core EMR oncology application. “We are excited to launch our IFC module with MUH, it has been one of the may new features that we have developed over the past year and we have just been waiting for a hospital to pilot it with, we expect to switch on the module for a number of our other epi-me customers shortly now that we have proven it in a production environment” said EpiSoft CEO, Jenny O’Neill. 

According to the Hospital’s project leads, Caroline O’D onnell “Our pre-admissions staff are already experiencing benefits in the short time we have been live, they are receiving legible, validated demographic and health history information well ahead of the patient’s admission”. 

EpiSoft have been busily expanding the functionality of their premiere patient portal product over the past year, the first major technical challenge was transitioning the application to a multi-tenanted version. According to EpiSoft sales & marketing manager, Aoife O’Sullivan “by moving to multi-tenanted solution all epi-me customers benefit from any development work we do, we can simply switch on new modules for existing customers as the feature comes online, this is a very appealing feature to our customers”. Other portal features include responsive design for use on any mobile device, clinical alert notification worklist for pre-admission staff, event triggered communications to the patient via sms or email, ability to view and or manage upcoming appointments, plus the application is architected to support multilingual versions. 

Epi-me was first launched back in 2011 with the Sydney Adventist Hospital. The company has a staggering 100% customer retention rate for epi-me. As well as being integrated to several of the most popular Patient Administration Systems, epi-me has integrated to numerous EMRs including EpiSoft’s own. EpiSoft’s EMR features custom workflows for oncology, infusion management, hepatitis, IBD, addiction disorders and mental health.