Cortex crosses the Southern Alps

Te Nīkau Hospital in Greymouth is live on Cortex, and Ashburton Hospital went live shortly before it.

The West Coast deployment is special because of what it connects. West Coast patients who need specialist care have always travelled over the Southern Alps to Christchurch, and their information travelled by fax, phone, and hope. Now clinicians on both sides of the alps work in one shared record: a patient transferred from Greymouth arrives in Christchurch with their tasks, notes, and care plans already there, and goes home the same way.

It also proves something about scale in the other direction. The same platform that runs a tertiary campus with 5,000 clinicians runs a rural hospital with a handful of generalists, with no cut-down version and no compromise on offline reliability, which rural connectivity makes more than theoretical.

Cortex now runs at Christchurch, Burwood, Ashburton, and Te Nīkau hospitals, at Hawke’s Bay, and with Nurse Maude in the community.