About Us
Communicare Systems is a software, services and support company providing innovative solutions to electronic health record management in primary health care (including Aboriginal Health) in Australia since 1994.
Our Managing Director and founder has over 20 years of experience in health informatics, and together with our highly skilled technical team, in-house clinical staff and dedication to collaboration with our end-users, we produce and deliver software that makes a genuine difference to patient care.
Communicare Systems is a proudly Australian owned and operated company with dedicated Software Development, Support (helpdesk and Level 2), Sales and Training teams. Our staff members live by our strong culture of service, and we maintain very close relationships with our end-users.
With a depth of technical and operational knowledge in the primary health care industry combined with a history of strategic alignment with existing and emerging NEHTA (National eHealth Transition Authority) standards and experience with Aboriginal rural and remote sites, Communicare Systems is well positioned to deliver a well-integrated and robust product.
Our Product
Communicare is a fully integrated electronic health and practice management system.
It is designed with a focus on Community Health, making it ideal for health services and social services whose primary concern is the health of the individual and of the community as a whole.
Communicare retails the software program along with second-to-none customer service and user support. Our ongoing involvement with health care settings gives us a detailed understanding of how primary health care in Australia operates, and this understanding allows Communicare staff to deliver contextualised and relevant support to our users.
It has been in use in Australia since 1994, primarily in Indigenous Health. Throughout this time the program has evolved significantly and continues to do so through a combination of cutting edge programming methods and our continued involvement with health care delivery settings and providers
We also offer training, database management consultancy and assistance with meeting annual reporting requirements, both on and off site.
The types of locations currently using Communicare includes:
- Medical clinics, staffed by any combination of doctors, nurses and health workers; in urban, rural, remote and community areas.
- Residential and non residential treatment facilities e.g. drug and alcohol rehabilitation.
- Hospitals.
- Remote nursing posts.
- Social Support Units e.g. community counselling services.
Features of the product:
Clinical Record
Communicare’s structured yet intuitive clinical record has all the features needed for paperless record keeping.
- Progress notes are kept in easy to use free text, whilst important symptoms, complaints, diagnoses and procedures are ICPC coded.
- Care plans are generated automatically according to required protocols whilst allowing customisation to particular client needs.
- Easy to use prescribing with interaction checking based on the well-known MIMS Pharmaceutical database.
- Letter writing is template based with spell checking.
- Investigation requesting with electronic result delivery.
- Document scanning and intelligent filling.
- On line links to the Australian Childhood Immunisation Register (ACIR).
- Instant graphing of lab results, child development charts and other measurements.
- Integrated Medicare billing including instant billing history review and automatic addition of certain item numbers such as health check claims.
- Referral management system with integrated transport scheduling to help clients with transport when required.
- Can have simultaneous access to the record.
- Multifaceted security access controls who can see what, and logs every client record access.
Electronic Communications
Communicare uses HL7 and PKI standard communications to maintain links to other health service providers, hospitals, specialists, laboratories and in fact any standards based computer system user.
Examples include:
- Hospital discharge letters.
- Outgoing and incoming referrals.
- Specialist letters.
- Radiology reports.
- Pathology results.
- Communicare also supports the Northern Territory ‘Shared Electronic Health Record’ (SEHR) which allows consenting client’s records to be shared between health providers.
Electronic Medicare Claiming
Communicare’s integrated Medicare billing is easy to use and easy to manage.
- Medicare cards are validated and revalidated automatically to minimise claiming problems due to invalid or expired cards.
- Claim submission is integrated with the clinical record making it extremely easy to claim each service as it occurs.
- Management screens and reports make it easy to deal with rejected claims, manage unclaimed services and control other exceptions.
- A rich variety of management reports aid financial functions such as bank statement reconciliation and provider claim activity.
Data Synchronisation
Unlike mainstream health, the delivery model of many Aboriginal Health Organisations takes the service to where the people are. That requires going to small communities and camps, often without knowing exactly who will be contacted.
Aboriginal people are often highly mobile. Services must be delivered as and when required and when the opportunity presents. Taking paper files or even 'briefcasing' electronic records is impractical. Communicare allows all records to be carried securely on a notebook computer and updated when and where needed.
Reporting and Analysis
Communicare boasts a library of over 800 reports. Health services freely select the reports most useful to their particular circumstances.
Data can be quickly exported in a wide variety of useful formats such as Excel, XML and many others. Powerful report scheduling features enable reports to be automatically generated and delivered by secure email on a recurrent basis. In other words, all your regular reporting can be done completely automatically.
Integrated ‘Query By Example’ and SQL tools make it easy to generate new reports or drill down into data for research. Open Data Base Connectivity (ODBC) and an included data dictionary allow other industry standard reporting and analysis tools to be used with Communicare.
Projects such as Australian (formally National) Primary Care Collaborative (APCC) and Healthy for Life (HfL) can be reported directly from a simple menu selection without the need to export data to other tools.
Appointments
Communicare’s appointment system is powerful yet easy to use and easy to change in a dynamic busy practice environment.
- Freely format the way multiple sessions are arranged for multiple providers working at one or more clinics.
- Appointment sessions may allow walk-in clients or not, or special sessions can be set exclusively for walk-ins.
- Free appointment searches allow easy location of appointment times for clients.
- Automatic and manual appointment reservation gives extra control over changing situations.
- Automatic appointment release ensures continuing appointment availability.
- Appointment sessions can be automatically generated according to a schedule, manually generated, or both.
- Waiting times and consultation times can be recorded and calculated automatically.
- Integrated transport system allows transport and other requirements to be scheduled and managed.
Data Entry Wizard
The data entry wizard allows common entries to be made into multiple client records without the need to open each file. This makes recording things such as ‘fluvax clinics and group activities a breeze.
Other Recent developments:
Some other recent developments and enhancements include:
- Support for PDF attachments using an easy drag and drop implementation.
- NT Shared Electronic Health Record e-Registration.
- Closing of the Gap enhancements for prescribing – function to enrol patients and annotate prescriptions.
- Transport management module.
- Extemporaneous preparations (drug recipes).
These features have been implemented and distributed through our usual release process and have been made available with software upgrades to our users.
