Patient Engagement

The report, tabled by the Queensland Audit Office (QAO), highlighted the benefits of the digital hospital program in Queensland, while making recommendations to improve governance of the future rollout. Key findings from the report identified that as a result of the digital hospital program, Queenslanders face improved health service delivery and patient outcomes, as well as a reduction in unplanned readmission rates. It found that medical staff can access clinical information faster and that patient records are more legible. Minister for Health and Ambulance Services Steven Miles said the digital hospital program is “one of the most significant health advances in decades”. “Digital hospitals are making Queensland hospitals safer than ever before. Doctors and nurses have told me when I’ve visited hospitals that the digital system helps them do their jobs and helps patients,” Miles said. Miles brought up the example of Metro South Health’s digital program, which he said contributed to a “significant increase” in early identification of deteriorating patients, as well as a decrease in emergency patient readmissions, less incidents linked to drug administration, monitoring, dispensing and supply and a significant drop in infections. As part of its move to digital, the healthcare provider most recently embarked on a journey to enable people living with progressive neurological conditions like Motor Neuron Disease (MND) to use mobile digital assistants daily. The report also identified the benefits that Princess Alexandra Hospital has faced and how it has become a template for the rest of the state following its adoption of an integrated electronic medical record (ieMR) system. “We can see digital hospitals are reducing the average length of stay and unplanned readmissions,” Queensland Chief Clinical Information Officer Dr Keith McNeil said. “Doctors are telling us the new system means they can spend more time on patient care and less time on paperwork. “Nurses are saying that the system means they have a huge amount of readily available information and they are not having to waste time searching for notes. This means the system is working.” He added that the increasing focus on technological advances and continuing improvements will continue to provide new opportunities. “Our increased focus on ieMR’s clinical capability will ensure our patients can access these opportunities, now and in the future.”   The report also found that while implementation costs exceeded initial expectations, it was often because hospitals spent more to go beyond the planned scope of their digital hospitals, bought extra devices to increase utilisation of the systems and invested more resources to reduce disruption on patient flow when new systems were introduced. Queensland Health Director-General Michael Walsh has reviewed the status of the system rollout and has made a number of changes relating to report recommendations. Walsh said the system was in place in 10 hospitals across the state’s Hospital and Health Services and that the department would continue to focus on ensuring the system delivered on benefits. He said Queensland Health has expanded the responsibility for managing the relationship with the digital hospital system provider and commenced an independent assessment to confirm that, as per the contract, the prices being paid for the system were no less favourable than those being paid by other health service providers in Australia. “The people of Queensland expect and deserve the very best care when they are treated in the state’s hospitals,” Walsh said. “The report confirms the system is helping us deliver that and we accept the system-oversight recommendations the QAO has made. They are not difficult to implement because they are not major adjustments.” This article first appeared on Healthcare IT News Australia.

The long-time Cerner executive takes the helm at startup, which develops technology to improve care for chronic conditions.

Last week, Parkway Pantai, one of the largest integrated private healthcare groups in Asia and UCARE.AI, a Singapore-based AI healthcare startup, announced that they have been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to dynamically generate personalised, more accurate hospital bill estimates that vary from the actual bill by a high 82 per cent accuracy rate on average, a significant 60-percentage-point improvement over the current bill estimation system. This means that eventually, all patients would receive highly accurate bill estimates that fall within an 18 percent margin from the final bill figure. Using an advanced suite of AI and machine learning algorithms from UCARE.AI, Mount Elizabeth, Mount Elizabeth Novena, Gleneagles and Parkway East hospitals in Singapore will dynamically generate personalised bill estimates based on relevant parameters such as the patient’s medical condition and medical practices. It also takes into account the patient’s current age, revisit frequency and existing co-morbidities like high blood pressure or diabetes. “Parkway Pantai has always been committed to enhancing price transparency of hospital charges. Our investment in this new AI-powered system gives patients more accurate hospital bill estimates and empowers them to make more well-informed decisions on the medical treatment options available. More importantly, it allows patients to have greater peace of mind over their healthcare expenditure so that they can focus on getting well,” said Mr Phua Tien Beng, Chief Executive Officer, Singapore Operations Division, Parkway Pantai. The new estimation system, which has been in use since November 2018, has made more than 10,000 predictions so far. In its first two weeks of going live, the AI system has already closed the average gap between the estimated and actual bills by 60 percent. The accuracy of its predictions is expected to improve over time as the AI collects and references more data through a process of self-learning. The system analyses a multitude of dynamically changing parameters specific to the individual patient. The information is then used to automatically and quickly predict the patients’ bill size at different touchpoints, from pre-admission till their eventual recovery. As such, patients are better informed and empowered to seek the treatment option that is most cost efficient and effective for recovery. In contrast, conventional bills estimation methods are based on statistical calculation of historical hospital bill sizes from past admissions up to two years ago. They are unable to account for dynamically changing factors such as disease aggravation and unexpected complications resulting in longer length of stay or additional unplanned surgeries. Mr. Neal Liu, Founder and CTO of UCARE.AI said, “UCARE.AI was selected by Parkway Pantai for providing (1) the most accurate and precise predictions based on blind-testing, and (2) a cloud-based microservices architecture solution that offers flexibility, scalability, ease and speed in implementation. We are thrilled to work with Parkway Pantai, one of the largest global healthcare players who pride themselves on innovation and quality patient care, to debut UCARE.AI’s first revolutionary AI-powered system. Together, we seek to ride the wave of healthcare disruption and roll out more AI systems and services to benefit patients globally.”

The Center for Addiction and Mental Health implemented alerting tech that saves patients’ lives.

Chair Global Board of Directors, HIMSS, Dr. Manish Kohli discusses global struggles with quality, access and cost of care and how China has stepped up to those challenges with remarkable speed and level of ambition.

Digital transformation is not reaching the patients yet – this is the key result of an international comparative study published by German foundation Bertelsmann Stiftung towards the end of November. In the study, Germany scores low and ranks 16th out of 17 countries surveyed worldwide regarding the digitization of their healthcare systems. Estonia, Canada, Denmark, Israel and Spain are in the first ranks of the comparison. The study finds that one of the major barriers to digital health adoption in Germany is the lack of a national coordination agency. “Politicians have in the past delegated the responsibility for digital transformation to self-government in health care," says Thomas Kostera, study director and health expert of the foundation. "The protagonists have been blocking each other for a long time and it has not yet been possible to bring all those responsible behind a common goal." Webinar: Patient Engagement: Transforming the Patient Experience with Innovative Digital Services Recently, health policy has strengthened its leadership role and some advancements, such as the introduction of telemedicine for remote treatment, have been made. The Bertelsmann Stiftung recommends politicians engage citizens, doctors and other health professionals to encourage digital health adoption. Users, such as patients and physicians, should be actively involved in developing sub-strategies and digital applications and processes, to ensure benefits become visible at an early stage. Study unveils great uncertainty about opportunities and risks of digital health care The Bertelsmann recommendation is underlined by the results of a representative survey by Nuance Communications among more than 2,000 people in Germany. This survey shows, that there is great uncertainty regarding risks and opportunities of digital health among citizens; only 26 percent of respondents feel sufficiently informed. A total of 77 percent of respondents said that they did not have enough digital literacy in the health sector or were unable to assess whether there was any need to catch up. "In Germany, there was no campaign that has extensively informed about the use of digital technologies in health care; the discussion remains in industry and expert circles. The good news is, that the population shows a high willingness to deal with digitalisation – which is essential to reach the government’s target of electronic health records for everyone by 2021," says Martin Eberhart, general manager of Nuance Healthcare for the  DACH region. More than 70 percent of citizens are willing to actively seek a higher digital literacy for their health care, as they expect much better chances of recovery from a digital healthcare system and more time for doctor-patient communication. They demand to be actively informed on digital health by their doctors, health insurance or through reliable education services. Jörg Studzinski, director research and advisory services at HIMSS Analytics Europe, demands a broad discussion as well as education and awareness campaigns. “Patients elsewhere have noticeably more opportunities to actively and informedly look after their own health care through digital technologies. Therefore politics, associations, health care institutions, the medical profession and technology providers must work together to increase transparency, understanding and speed. "The fact that many citizens do not feel sufficiently informed reflects our experience in hospitals. Even in health care facilities, there is still no comprehensive understanding of the opportunities and risks of digital health," he said. With the commissioning of the telematics infrastructure, an important step has been taken towards a forward-looking healthcare system. Around 225,000 doctors, dentists, hospitals, psychotherapists and other health care professionals will be securely networked in the future. Armin Scheuer is a digital health expert and consultant, and a former HIMSS Vice President.

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John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, discusses the benefits, challenges and evolution with voice technologies amid the growing number of apps and interest from major companies and health systems today.