Telehealth

Liz Ashall-Payne, co-founder and CEO of ORCHA, says the health apps landscape is growing beyond just wellness management.

Swinburne University’s National eTherapy Centre has partnered with medtech startup Coviu to allow Australians to access quality mental health services through encrypted, real-time text chat sessions. The service is offered as part of Swinburne’s Mental Health Online, which is free for all Australians and provides access to treatment programs for common mental health issues including depression and anxiety. Real-time text chat sessions with clinicians will now be a part of the service, alongside email and video calls, offering an additional modality to suit a broader remit of needs within the community.   THE LARGER TREND In April this year, Swinburne partnered with Coviu for telehealth education. The partnership sees Swinburne embedding Coviu’s technology into the curriculum of nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, dietetics, health science, and digital health and informatics. The technology has also been implemented into Swinburne’s new Master of Physiotherapy and Graduate Certificate in Teleaudiology. ON THE RECORD “Since being rolled out in March this year, the chat sessions have become a very popular option amongst our clients. It’s now one of the most common modalities we use to support clients in completing their online mental health program. For many clients, a real-time text chat session is a practical first step into talking with a health practitioner, which for some can be quite confronting,” said Dr Liz Seabrook, Digital Mental Health Fellow at Swinburne, in a statement. CEO and co-founder of Coviu Dr Silvia Pfeiffer said: “Our goal is to make healthcare services easily accessible and usable to all citizens, and this partnership with Swinburne’s Mental Health Online service takes us another step closer. We work hard to ensure our telehealth technology is easy to use, and are constantly looking at new ways for people to use the service. I’m thrilled to hear the text-only chat sessions are helping hundreds of people across Australia.”

American Telemedicine Association's "State of the States Report" finds progress, but still sees strategies for states to be incentivized to adopt pro-telehealth policies.

The Guam Department of Public Health and Social Services has confirmed 1,417 TB medication doses from 35 unique patients, saved $21,255 in staff time, saved $3,457 in gasoline, and cut 700 hours of driving time.

Ver2 Digital Medicine aims to improve access to healthcare for refugees at scale by connecting them with doctors via a ubiquitous telehealth platform, says CEO Brian de Francesca.

Thailand’s population is ageing rapidly with almost half of its electorate above 50 years old by 2025. Healthcare costs are rising and it is not tenable in the long-run to keep building hospitals. One possible consideration for the country is the shift towards value-based healthcare (VBHC), which is about improving healthcare outcomes at lower cost. It focuses on what patients value and allocates resources according to the health outcomes delivered by the system, rather the traditional model of a volume or visit-based healthcare system. While VBHC sounds promising, the reality is that it is challenging to achieve as transforming a health system that is truly patient-centred and outcome based requires a lot of work. According to an article by the World Economic Forum, the transformation to a value-based health system requires:  - Sufficient technical expertise about VBHC to design and implement its core features. - Leaders committed to trying ideas and willing to accept the risks involved. - Cooperation among different organisations working together to improve outcomes for patients. The same article offers four key lessons for a successful switch to VBHC. Firstly, it is to focus on outcomes that matter to patients, rather than merely focusing on processes or costs. In the context of Thailand, this could mean bringing care to people especially in rural areas in which healthcare is not easily accessible. In that regard, Thailand has begun development of its telemedicine programme at 32 hospitals located in rural areas in eight provinces since March this year. Telemedicine services will be offered by the initial 32 hospitals as soon as by the fourth quarter of 2019. Another key lesson for a successful switch to VBHC is to engage partners from across the whole health system. In order to achieve meaningful system-wide change, transformation efforts have to include organisations from across the entire system, including the private sector. The unique advantage that Thailand has is its advanced development of the private healthcare sector, given the country’s reputation as a regional medical tourism hub. However, the challenge lies in how government institutions such as the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) can meaningfully engage the private healthcare sector in moving towards VBHC. Next, stakeholders need to acknowledge that systems change is going to be hard, and they need to adopt a long-term perspective rather than looking only for “quick wins” or easy answers. eHealth is one of the tools that could be used towards achieving VBHC, and the MOPH has a long-term strategy to drive the growth and development of eHealth from 2017-2026. At its core, the aim is to develop a capable and interoperable health information system as well as digital health technologies to bring about value and improved standards of care. The last lesson is to take a problem-driven approach. In healthcare, it is often easy to ‘cut and paste’ solutions from other health systems but sometimes the answers or successful models may lie within. Telemedicine policies, for example, are still being studied in Thailand and the government is looking into more investments and getting the timing right to provide on-demand digital care to locals, expats and tourists, according to an article by Healthcare Asia.  With the theme of “Empowering Value Creation”, the upcoming HIMSS AsiaPac19 conference will be held in Bangkok, Thailand from October 7 to October 10 2019, featuring five main tracks: (i) Sustainability and growth (ii) Patient experience (iii) Unlocking the value of AI (iv) Value-based care (v) Health 2.0 Learn more about the HIMSS AsiaPac19 event here and those who are interested to speak or present at the event can sign up here. 

Victoria Betton, mHabitat founder and director and HIMSS UK Advisory Council member, says anonymity and remote access are just two benefits of using digital tools to help improve people's mental well-being.

Accenture's Kaveh Safavi discusses healthcare's outsized spend on labor – and how machine learning, telehealth and consumerism are transforming how work is done and who does it.

Taegyun Song, director of Korea Health Industry Development Institute, says over 90% of hospitals in Korea use an e-health system that tracks the patient journey, and now the aim is to develop systems outside medical institutions.