Health Information Services (HIS) provides a range of services for Portland District Health including record retrieval, clinical coding, system administration, forms design and clerical services. The Health Information staff within HIS have many years of experience in information management and can provide advice and guidance to staff and the wider community on all aspects of health information management.
Location: HIS is located on the Ground floor of the Main Building at PDH. Just past the kiosk, opposite Pathology and Radiology.
The functions of HIS
- To retrieve, supply and maintain medical records as required for direct patient care.
- To provide and maintain an efficient record storage system in which patient information is kept safe from loss, damage and unauthorised access.
- To ensure diagnosis and procedure coding is performed in an accurate and timely manner to enable optimal DRG assignment.
- To collect statistical data on the Hospital’s activity and throughput, and disseminate the information to management and external authorities within the required timeframe for funding purposes.
- To develop and maintain electronic health records through the use of TrakCare. This involves system development, staff training and where required process re-engineering.
- To provide health information to both internal and external requestors, for planning, research, education, patient care, freedom of information requests and other purposes, in accordance with hospital policies and statutory requirements.
- To maintain registers, indexes and databases of patients and health information.
- To provide advice and education on casemix related issues, which involve documentation, coding and DRG allocation.
- To ensure the design and content of the medical record meets the needs of users and conforms to recognised standards.
- To provide advice to other hospital departments in relation to records (clinical and non-clinical), including design, retention, storage and disposal.
Privacy of your Health Information
Portland District Health takes its responsibility seriously about keeping your personal information secure.
The information that is collected about you is stored securely and is only accessed by authorised staff.
The information collected by the hospital about you in the patient record belongs to the hospital. If you want to look at your patient record you will need to request this through the Freedom of Information Act. Please contact the FOI Clerk on 03 5521 0341 for an application form. Or download one here.
About the Health Information Management Profession
Find out more here:
Health Information Management Association of Australia http://www.himaa.org.au
Health Informatics Society of Australia http://www.hisa.org.au
Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner http://www.privacy.vic.gov.au
Public Record Office of Victoria http://www.prov.vic.gov.au
Office of the Health Services Commissioner http://www.health.vic.gov.au/hsc/
Victorian Admitted Episodes Dataset (VAED) http://www.health.vic.gov.au/hdss/vaed/
International Federation of Health Information Management Associations http://www.ifhima.org
Study Health Information Management here:
Visit the HIMAA website (http://himaa2.org.au/?q=node/96) to find out more about becoming Health Information Management professional.
