Patient Engagement

Yesterday, Icon Group (Icon), Australia’s largest dedicated private provider of cancer care, officially signed an agreement with China’s Sanbo Brain Hospital Group (Sanbo) to deliver radiation oncology services, which are set to open later this year in their Chang’an hospital in Chongqing. Sanbo is a group of Chinese hospitals internationally recognised for delivering specialist neurological services, including treatments for brain cancer. The group operates six brain hospitals in Beijing, Chongqing, Kunming, Fuzhou and Jinan. The agreement will see Icon operate the Chang’an Chongqing centre, with the site already in initial stages of development. Why it matters Icon will manage the facility in partnership with Sanbo, embedding a blend of international expertise to deliver a high-quality approach to cancer care. The centre will have the capacity to treat 900 patients annually. Through the partnership, Icon will be sharing their expertise in radiation therapy, including remote radiation therapy planning with Sanbo. Icon’s centralised remote planning function, performed by a specialist, highly-skilled workforce of radiation therapists, uses advanced software systems to create individual, high-quality radiation therapy treatment plans for patients regardless of location. What’s the trend In June 2016, Icon signed a joint venture with China-based Yibai Healthcare to provide world-class radiation therapy services to 50 cancer centres across China. Yibai Healthcare is part of the Shanghai-listed GuiZhou YiBai Pharmaceutical company which engages in the research, development, production, and sale of pharmaceutical products in China. The joint venture saw the launch of Icon’s newest arm – Icon Plan. Icon Plan is a centralised, remote radiation therapy dosimetry function for radiation oncology. Dosimetry involves data obtained during the planning consultation with a radiation oncology patient and uses that data to plan how the machine will target and deliver radiation to the tumour. On the record “The collaboration with Icon Group will increase Sanbo’s capacity in radiation therapy and chemotherapy, improve comprehensive cancer treatment, and provide an exceptional service to patients,” said Yang Zhang, General Manager of Sanbo. Icon Group CEO, Mark Middleton said, “Cancer incidence in China alone are expected to increase by 70% by 2025, we are dedicated to helping reduce that burden. Icon is the first Australian healthcare company to export Australian cancer expertise into China, further providing training and education for local clinicians and staff and helping China deliver the best possible care to their people.”

Integrated care and interoperability is complex if it has to be managed by experts. It becomes pretty easy once you let the patient have a say, according to Philipp Grätzel von Grätz, editorial director of HIMSS Insights.

Through the UVA Center for Telehealth, the organization will also develop training courses for healthcare providers that help them identify and treat chronic diseases.

Harvard University’s Stan Shaw and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center’s John Halamka detail a new executive education joint venture between Harvard Medical School and HIMSS.

The tool will deliver what the company calls Health Nudges to help users better manage hypertension.

Also: Dutch AI startup Aidence closes €10m Series A funding round; North of Scotland Care Portal goes live; mHabitat director warns patients should be involved in the design of digital tools.

The Palmerston North-based Health Hub Project in New Zealand is aiming to reduce health inequities and increase access to care with the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain. Project co-founder David Hill is a GP at the Health Hub Project in Palmerston North, which runs four general practices with around 9000 patients. Hill says clinically trained people are a diminishing resource in healthcare and the system cannot rely on that to ensure its sustainability in the future, therefore technology needs to be used to “balance that inequity of supply and demand”. “The whole point of what we are doing is trying to make sure that we use IT in a way that allows or permits greater equity of access to patients and starts to reduce the reliance on the ever-dwindling resource of healthcare workers,” he says. “Also, to advance the value proposition that we give to patients.” The first stage of the Health Hub Project is developing a New Zealand-focused model of risk stratification to identify those patients who are most at risk and in need of services. “We want to look at a much more integrated model of risk stratification, so it’s not just clinical but psychosocial factors like housing and education as well,” explains Hill. He says these factors are drivers of poor health, which impact Māori and Pasifika people disproportionally, and the model could help differentiate other drivers. He is also working with researchers at Massey University to develop a social exclusion measurement for New Zealand, which will be incorporated into the risk stratification. The project’s aim is to create a database of patient information and to use AI and machine learning to develop the risk stratification score and enable researchers to look at the impact of health interventions. Hill says the database will start with the 9000 patients at the Health Hub Project practice. Patients will have access via an app to their own data, and be able to input it, as well as choose how it is shared with researchers. The organisation is working with a small team of New Zealand-based software architects to design, develop and implement into practice a secure application, using blockchain technology. “The nice thing about blockchain is it allows you to identify each block of data and anonymise it,” he says. The data will be housed in a data warehouse and the primary use will be for the direct care of that patient. “So, when a patient phones for an appointment, we know their risk stratification score and that allows us to allocate appropriate resource for the patient when they come in,” he says. The current thinking is that if patients want an expanded analysis that includes comparing their diagnosis with larger populations, they would have to opt in to sharing their information anonymously for research purposes. Hill says they are talking to a number of potential investors locally and internationally about the data analysis tool and app to progress the development of the software. This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.

Nick Knowlton, VP of strategic initiatives at Brightree, discusses working with the CommonWell Health Alliance to enable patient-centric interoperability across the spectrum of care.

The focus should be on wellcare not healthcare, because finding a condition early results in better outcomes and better costs, says Nick van Terheyden, managing director of Incremental Healthcare.

The initiatives will see academics collaborate with businesses to generate improvements in treatment options for asthma patients, as estimates show around 5.4 million people in the UK are affected by the condition.