What is Walrus?
Walrus is a flexible point of care tool developed by Outcome Health to support clinicians and practice staff to pull up insights of patients quickly with prompt notifications sitting on top of clinical software. It is a tool that can provide guidance to a GP/ nurse/ receptionist to ensure patient records and PIP QI data are always up to date.
Who will benefit from using Walrus?
- Clinician
- Walrus can provide clinician prompts to specific items such as missing data, clinical prompts, risk scores, or MBS items
- Support systematic approach for health promotion and preventative care
- Colour-coded urgency notifications support clinicians identifying risk factors, allowing early intervention
- Improve patient quality of care by keeping patient’s clinical data up to date
- Assist clinicians to easily identify patient’s MBS eligibility according to practice billing history and increase practice revenue
- The tool is able to be repositioned freely but consistently on top of the clinical software during a consultation
- Walrus can be minimised to the desktop notification bar if you do not want to see it on the screen
- Practice staff
- Improve workflow efficiency
- Increase productivity by filling in missing non-clinical patient information
- Customise group button that suits staff position or role with hide/unhide function
- It does not slow down the clinical system as it communicates with the POLAR extraction tool instead of the clinical database
- Patient
- Avoid delays in intervention with up-to-date clinical data
- Improve health outcomes
How does Walrus work?
Once Walrus is logged in and a patient file is opened in the clinical software, the Walrus interface will appear with the patient’s basic information and notification groups underneath. It will only pick up the active window information, hence, if a user has multiple patient files open, Walrus will only show the patient information that is currently in the active window.
It consists of 7 groups with coloured tags on the top left-hand corner and colour codes to the items within each group. Each colour represents a different level of urgency:
- Green: appear against the group with no data missing or not relevant
- Yellow: data missing – low urgency
- Orange: data missing – medium urgency
- Red: data missing – high urgency
Users can choose groups that apply to their role by clicking “+” on the right-hand side.
Simply clicking on each group button will bring up a page of information or missing data above the Walrus interface. By clicking “Open”, it will take you to the page in the clinical software where you can fill in the missing data. Once missing data is filled, coloured notification will be updated/disappear in 24 hours.
What now?
With Walrus roll outs to all practices, you can easily install the tool by following the below steps:
- Download the Walrus tool installer from the front page of POLAR or via this installation link
- Click the INSTALL button to download the setup file
- Run the installer application, setup.exe
- Click the INSTALL button
- When Walrus starts, you will be asked to enter your POLAR username and password
Tips for setting up your Walrus
- Before starting to use the tool, it is important to go to the settings wheel and tick the checkboxes ‘Remember Login’ and ‘Start with Windows’ to have this tool automatically opened whenever the user accesses the clinical software tool
- Selecting “Screen Triggering” is recommended as it enables the user to enter missing data more efficiently by opening the relevant screen of the clinical software
- Walrus tool is required to be installed in each workstation, and it is recommended that each user to have their own login account for the tool
Support and Resources
Resources are available on our POLAR resources webpage if you would like to know more about its functionality and how it can assist your daily task:
- Walrus Webinar
- Walrus FAQ
- Walrus User Guide
Please get in touch with your assigned Practice Support Officer or Health System Improvement Officer for any further support in using the Walrus tool.