Clinical

Real-time notifications have allowed the case managers to follow up with more patients during their hospital stay and engage members. It’s also made for more accurate contact information.

In May, the annual meeting of internists in Germany took place in Wiesbaden - and was attended by around 8,300 physicians and experts, as well as 2,000 patients. The 125th Congress of the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) looked at digital medicine and the opportunities, risks and perspectives in connection with major topics such as intensive care medicine, rare diseases, non-drug therapies and health research. So, what opportunities does digital medicine offer the internist? According to speakers at the congress this year, the aim must be to use digitisation tools effectively in order to facilitate earlier diagnosis and better treatments.  "Ultimately, we want to gain more time to turn to the patients - a concern of ours that can be achieved with digital medicine, if used properly," said Professor Claus Vogelmeier, chairman of the event. The conference looked at big data and data security, as well as personalised colorectal cancer screening and the potential for digital tools in specific diseases such as thyroid carcinoma. On the record Doctors should not be controlled by fears, but by hope and optimism, said Professor Vogelmeier, while Frank Ulrich Montgomery, president of the German Medical Association (BÄK), argued that Germany was behind in terms of digitising its healthcare system, particularly when compared to other modern industrialised countries. “In many countries that we regard as developing countries, the possibilities and opportunities of digitisation have been used and understood much more than in our country, " he told delegates at the event. Need for patient empowerment The conference also organised a special ‘Patient Day’, which was attended by around 2,000 people, and, at a press conference, physician and comedian Eckart von Hirschhausen talked about empowering patients through the use of digital tools. "We urgently need transparent, publicly financed jointly financed sites and search engines with evidence-based, tested content without commercial interests," Hirschhausen said. Focus on research centres In addition, the congress presented to the public results from research carried out by the German Centers for Health Research (DZG), in which certain major disease areas are investigated and researched with a result- and application-oriented approach. The aim is to prepare internists for everyday practice and shift the focus to a holistic approach, according to speakers at the event. Meanwhile, with the "Young Internists Forum", the congress was also aimed specifically at students and young doctors of internal medicine who visited it numerous times. More information can be found here. Anna Engberg is a Wiesbaden-based freelance journalist specialising in health and technology.

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eHealth NSW in Australia has announced that it will be working with a number of industry partners to enhance the safety and quality of patient care, with clinicians at one of the state’s major rural hospitals harnessing the power of digital tools in two proof-of-concept (PoC) projects. At the 325-bed Wagga Wagga Base Hospital in the state’s south-east, eHealth NSW and Murrumbidgee Local Health District are partnering on two PoC projects which combine the expertise of Alcidion, CSIRO and Evidentli and use Apple products. PoC 1: Mobilising data to improve the safety and quality of care during a patient’s hospital stay The first PoC project is exploring how critical test results can be shared securely and in real time via mobile devices to support enhanced clinical decision-making. For Dr Stephen Wood, Director of Wagga Wagga Base Hospital’s Emergency Department (ED), this PoC has the real potential to assist clinicians with making decisions about the diagnosis and treatment of patients in time-pressured ED environments. “We want to give clinicians fast access to meaningful data insights which can help them to identify patients at risk of deterioration, and provide more timely mobile access to pathology results and X-rays,” Dr Wood said. A team of 10 ED clinicians is trialling mobile notifications of real-time pathology results and risk indicators, via Alcidion’s Miya Precision Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tool. Notifications will be delivered through Apple products, including iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch. The Miya Precision platform uses the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to map data to standard terminology. This can form a basis for integrating other Artificial Intelligence and Predictive Analytics algorithms to monitor and detect safety problems. “The platform is able to deliver additional clinical insights including deteriorating kidney function, coagulation management, antibiotic stewardship, management of gram-negative bacterial infections, low blood glucose and sepsis monitoring,” said Kate Quirke, Chief Executive Officer of Alcidion Group. In order to prove these capabilities, the CSIRO’s ED re-admission risk algorithm will use the data supplied and make the results available via the Miya Precision platform. CSIRO is Australia’s national science agency. David Hansen, Chief Executive Officer of CSIRO’s Australian e-Health Research Centre, added: “It’s exciting to work with NSW Health to bring new technologies into everyday use in healthcare. Data-driven healthcare is very much the future of innovation in healthcare – this project is part of that transformation.” PoC 2: Creating an open platform for digital innovation in NSW Health The second PoC aims to create an open platform that provides access to simulated data, which researchers and developers can use to test functionality and feasibility of their models in a safe environment and without putting patients’ privacy at risk. Multiple yet anonymised datasets are being mined, via the Miya Precision platform, to cover common health challenges such as diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Cloud software company Evidentli is using its Clinical Research Automation software, Piano, which connects to a variety of data sources and provides security and workflows to automate research. Best-of-breed statistical, analytic, and documentation tools will enable Murrumbidgee LHD to perform clinical research in a fraction of the time it has historically taken. And, because Piano transforms data into open standards and automatically documents methods, research is immediately reproducible and ready for peer review. The platform, said Dr Wood, is “an incredibly powerful research tool which accurately captures activity to give insights into factors such as a patient’s risk of readmission as well as compliance with clinical pathways and the provision of clinically appropriate care”. “The digitisation of healthcare is ramping up and all clinicians need to embrace it with a view to developing a platform that improves access to the information they require to deliver timely and appropriate clinical care,” said Dr Wood. “We are excited to be a part of these six-month projects and I hope that both prove to be successful.” Recent digital health-related developments in Australia Earlier this week, CSIRO and GenesisCare announced a A$5.1M research partnership which focuses on an emerging area of science called theranostics to develop new therapies against some of the most fatal and difficult-to-treat cancers affecting Australians. The federal government of Australia recently announced that it will invest A$5M to facilitate the implementation of PainChek’s pain recognition app in Australian residential aged care centres (RAC’s), according to a Mobihealth News article.

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