AMA Victoria lobbies new govt over secure messaging, RTPM

The Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) has called on the newly elected state government to address four key health issues in addition to its long list of pre-election promises, which included building two new hospitals.

The Labor government today named Jill Hennessy as health minister and Martin Foley as minister for mental health.

The AMA said it was particularly supportive of the new government’s commitment to undertake a public hospital bed count and expand health services in the western and eastern growth corridors, although it is opposed to its plan to fund 24-hour pharmacies with a night nurse triaging minor health concerns and a pilot plan to put GPs in high schools.

What is also hopes is that the government address four areas it did not discuss before the election: banning smoking in outdoor dining areas, publishing outpatient waiting lists, the introduction of real-time monitoring of prescription drugs, and improved health IT resources.

The AMA is particularly keen on increasing ICT funding for hospital-GP communications through secure messaging.

“At present, GPs are ‘data dumped’ with patient files and their discharge summaries,” the AMA said before the election. “These documents cannot be searched for keywords, such as blood test results; instead GPs need to view every page for the relevant information.

“Some patient files can be 200 pages long. Outpatient appointments and discharge summaries are still being faxed.”

It has also long argued for the urgent introduction of real-time prescription monitoring, for which it secured a promise of $6.98 million over five years from the previous government.

“We hope that Labor introduces a real-time prescription monitoring system, as currently there a more fatalities from the misuse of pharmaceutical medications than on the state’s roads,” it said.

In addition to promising to introduce new laws on advance care directives and patients’ end of life choices, Labor has promised to:

Hills licenses home brands to Woolies to focus on technology

Hills has signed a strategic deal with Woolworths to license 240 of its household products, allowing the SA-based company to shift its entire focus to the technology side of its business, which includes healthcare and security.

Hills set up a healthcare division two years ago to develop a portfolio of technology solutions aimed at the healthcare sector, particularly hospitals, residential aged care and home-based care.

Hills Health Solutions’ portfolio now includes IP and WiFi nurse call systems from Merlon and Questek, Hospital Television Rentals (HTV), a distribution agreement with Irish hospital patient infotainment firm Lincor, and another for Lively, a range of home monitoring sensors.

The licensing agreement with Woolworths will see the retail giant have exclusive rights to the Hills brand for its iconic Hills Hoist, clothes care and garden sprayers, which Woolworths will distribute through its Masters, Home Timber and Hardware and Big W stores.

Hills will retain ownership of its intellectual property and will receive income from annual licensing fees, which it plans to invest in its technology interests, which also include security and surveillance, audio visual, automation, and communications and mobility.

“This agreement will also allow Hills to focus on building our technology business, particularly our security and healthcare portfolio to achieve our stated growth ambitions,” Hills CEO Ted Pretty said.

“Additionally, we will enjoy greater certainty of earnings and a strengthening of our profit performance. There will be a positive impact on the balance sheet from the reduced requirement for working capital.

“This is an exciting step forward in our strategy to be Australia’s leading provider of technology solutions into government, enterprise, business and the home.”

HIPS for private hospitals as states outline eHealth progress

The National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) is in discussions with the private hospital sector about using middleware designed by the South Australian Health Department to link private hospitals to the PCEHR.

SA Health’s Healthcare Identifier and PCEHR Services (HIPS) product has been designed to support PCEHR interfaces for document upload, retrieval and management as well as interfaces to the Healthcare Identifiers (HI) Service.

It is also being developed to provide secure message delivery (SMD) interfaces to support point-to-point message processing.

NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming told the Rural Medicine Australia (RMA) conference in Sydney last week that the organisation was also working with the states and territories on how to include pathology and diagnostic imaging results generated in the public system on the PCEHR.

Mr Fleming provided a brief update on how each jurisdiction was progressing with PCEHR integration, with Queensland the most advanced in having all but two hospitals connected, and NSW set to have all of its hospitals connected by March next year.

Tasmania has used HIPS to link its public hospitals to send discharge summaries, and it is also working on how to send raw medication data to the PCEHR, Mr Fleming said.

South Australia has seven hospitals connected and the ACT has connected the Canberra Hospital. Mr Fleming said NEHTA was working with WA and Victoria on a roll-out strategy, with Royal Perth Hospital and Eastern Health having gone live with discharge summaries.

The Northern Territory is about to begin work on migrating its My eHealth Record over to the PCEHR once the next release is available. This release is planned to include the facility to upload pathology and diagnostic imaging, a necessary requirement for the NT to join the national system. This work will also include linking its hospitals.

“Every jurisdiction has committed to this, not just in terms of discharge [summaries] and viewing but in medication data,” Mr Fleming said.

“We are working with the jurisdictions to make some business cases to get pathology and diagnostic imaging also feeding through.

“That’s the public sector. The work we have done to integrate that we are now making available to the private hospitals, the HIPS system, and entering into some quite detailed discussions with them at the moment.”

Also at the RMA conference, a representative of each state and territory provided a presentation of the wider eHealth and telehealth developments the jurisdictions are working on. In addition to the summary below, Pulse+IT will provide a more detailed look at each jurisdiction over the next week.

Western Australia: The executive director of medical services for WA Country Health Services, Tony Robins, outlined the difficulties in providing adequate connectivity to people living in the remotest parts of the state such as the Kimberley, where some communities have just one public telephone box to share. WA is working on providing satellite links to some of the communities, where other broadband technologies are impossible.

Dr Robins defended the state’s Emergency Telehealth Service (ETS), which provides video conferencing capability with emergency specialists in Perth to nurses working in small rural clinics and hospitals when a GP is not available. The scheme has been criticised by rural GPs and doctors’ groups who say the service bypasses GPs in other towns who could provide assistance.

NSW: eHealth NSW’s director of innovation, strategy and architecture Michael Costello explained the structure of the new agency and announced that the position of director of rural health had been filled.

Dr Costello said the state’s HealtheNet system, designed to link acute and community-provided care to the PCEHR, would be rolled out to all NSW public hospitals by March next year. He also said the Health Wide Area Network (HWAN) being built to link all public healthcare sites to the state’s telehealth network would be complete by the end of 2015.

Northern Territory: The NT’s chief clinical information officer, Leonie Katekar, discussed progress in telehealth, the shared electronic health record, point-of-care testing and moves to update both the hospital medical records system and primary care information systems.

Dr Katekar also provided some detail on the work the Territory is doing with Telstra through the new National Telehealth Connection Service to enable non-government health sites in remote areas to connect to the government telehealth service.

Queensland: Queensland’s acting chief technical officer at the Health Information Services Agency, Paul Carroll, focused on inter-provider and inter-facility information sharing.

He outlined progress in the use of telehealth, which he said grew by 40 per cent last year, and announced that as of this week, public hospital clinicians and rural GPs with hospital visiting rights will be able to view radiology reports through Queensland’s The Viewer system.

South Australia: Executive director of mental health with the Country SA Local Health Network, Rebecca Graham, discussed projects delivering telehealth services to the APY Lands in Central Australia and to provide support to after-hours GPs on the Eyre Peninsula.

Ms Graham alluded to the problems the state was experiencing in the roll-out of its EPAS system in its public hospitals, as well as moves to potentially adopt WA’s Emergency Telehealth Service. Country Health SA had developed an acronym for the new service – SAVES – which unfortunately is already in use by the state’s voluntary euthanasia movement, so an alternative is going to be needed, she said.

Victoria: With Victoria now in caretaker mode due to the forthcoming election, the Victorian Department of Health’s manager for telehealth strategy and development, Geraldine McDonald, was restricted in what she could say.

However, she outlined developments in telehealth, such as the establishment of a state-wide telehealth system for all mental health services with an inpatient facility, along with enabling the Hume region with telehealth facilities at 14 urgent care centres and the expansion of the successful Victorian Stroke Telemedicine service into the same region.

ACT: The ACT’s manager for national eHealth initiatives, Ian Bull, concentrated on the capital’s work in providing a range of clinical portals for consumers and clinicians, in addition to internal portals that are being used to link disparate information systems.

The ACT is also working on developing and implementing clinical terminologies, as well as developing an alerts system for allergies, adverse reactions and also some administrative alerts about a patient’s social conditions.

The Canberra Hospital has been sending discharge summaries to the PCEHR since March last year, and is now working on coordinating eReferrals into a common interface to be able to receive eReferrals from doctors’ systems directly into the hospital’s system.

Tasmania: Tasmania’s presentation was delivered by former ACRRM president Jeff Ayton on behalf of acting chief information officer Tom Simpson. Dr Ayton discussed the benefits of the NBN roll-out in Tasmania and the state’s ability to make things happen more quickly with a small population.

He also discussed a new Connected Care Foundation project, which will see the implementation of a clinical portal and data repository in Tasmania’s major acute facilities, including PCEHR viewing in early 2015.

External territories: Dr Ayton is also the chief medical officer of the Australian Antarctic Division and was able to proudly state that the entire continent was equipped with shared electronic health records.

“We also have point of care testing linked in with HL7 messaging through to the shared electronic health record, and now we’ve got PACS imaging coming within the electronic health record, all delivered over satellite with huge latencies,” he said.

Decision support for bugs and drugs

This story first appeared in the July 2014 issue of Pulse+IT Magazine.

An electronic antimicrobial stewardship approval and decision support software program known as eASY that was designed by clinicians from the Northern Sydney Local Health District (NSLHD) has undergone a revamp recently, with new functionality added that provides decision support on drug dosing and multi-site levels of restriction, in addition to existing tools such as guidelines on what antibiotics to use and real-time notifications of approval or refusal.

eASY was developed by a team led by the director of pharmacy at Manly and Mona Vale hospitals, Noman Masood, and the director of operations at NSLHD, Andrew Montague, in association with a local vendor partner. Since its release in 2011, eASY has been implemented in hospitals throughout the district, including Mona Vale, Manly, Royal North Shore, Ryde and Hornsby hospitals, and discussions are underway to provide a free licence to use the product in any public hospital in NSW.

An updated version of the program was developed earlier this year that features new functionality, including a tool that helps clinicians decide on the individualised dose of antibiotics based on kidney function.

It also now comes with multi-site functionality so smaller hospitals within a local health district that might not have sufficient infectious disease specialists on staff can add extra layers of restrictions to the prescribing of antibiotics. There are also plans to provide bacteria-based decision support, which will allow doctors to perform a point-of-care check on the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in different areas based on type of pathogen.

Mr Masood says the impetus behind the development of the program was two-fold. When the idea was first considered four or five years ago, it was becoming obvious that public hospitals would be mandated to manage and restrict access to antibiotics due to the emerging dangers of antimicrobial resistance.

To read the full story, click here for the July 2014 issue of Pulse+IT Magazine.

Pepster device for PEP therapy takes out iAward

A breathing device that uses gaming techniques to help patients with cystic fibrosis complete positive expiratory pressure (PEP) therapy and lets parents and clinicians monitor progress over time has won its designer a $15,000 prize at the iAwards.

Pepster consists of a PEP therapy device that is linked to tablet or smartphone apps to monitor and motivate patients doing respiratory physiotherapy. For the patient, there are two games that encourage the correct technique and duration, while parents and clinicians can monitor progress and collect additional data such as the effect of environmental or lifestyle factors on the patient’s health.

The device is currently being trialled with 30 patients with CF at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane before being readied for the approval process with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA).

Designed by University of Queensland engineering PhD students Elliot Smith, Gavin Kremor and Jeremy Herbert – who have subsequently set up HSK Instruments to commercialise the device – Pepster was featured in the Apps4Broadband challenge last year and last week won a $15,000 prize for Mr Smith, who was named the Hills Young Innovator of the Year at the iAwards.

Mr Smith said the idea for Pepster came about in the final year of the team’s electrical engineering degrees, which required a thesis project. He and his colleagues met with clinicians from the Mater about some of the problems faced in motivating children to do their physiotherapy, but also in properly monitoring how the therapy was progressing.

“From the clinical perspective, one of the big problems is that once they are out of the hospital, we don’t know if they are doing the physio because of the inability to record anything on the current hardware,” Mr Smith said.

“From the parents’ point of view, the lack of incentive and motivation really makes it hard for the parents to get their kids to do their exercises. So we decided to try to find a system to tackle both of those problems.”

PEP therapy uses inhalation and exhalation exercises that are designed to clear the thick mucus characteristic of cystic fibrosis. It is used as an alternative to chest physiotherapy using percussion.

Mr Smith and his team have designed a new PEP therapy device that can connect to standard face masks as well as to a tablet device. They have also designed two games – one involving spaceships and the other birds – that are controlled by the patient’s respiration.

“Essentially there are different elements in the games that are controlled through the device, so their breathing changes things in the game,” Mr Smith said. “For example, in the space game, the spaceship moves up and down based on whether they are breathing in or out. The way to get the highest possible score in the game is to do what is clinically recognised as ideal physiotherapy.”

While the games are a motivating tool for the child, Pepster can also collect a great deal of data for clinical and research purposes that has previously been unavailable.

“First and foremost we want to know when they are doing the therapy and how often they are doing it, to see if they are attempting to do it at all,” Mr Smith said. “Secondary to that, we want to know how well they are doing it.

“Essentially they have a goal of breathing in for around about one second and out for three seconds. Their inspiration is a normal in-breath, and as they breath out there is resistance, which helps build up the pressure, which is what clears the mucus out.

“If you can imagine the inspiration to be zero and the expiration to be one, you get a square shape, and we are measuring how closely they fit to that shape.”

For parents and clinicians, there is a huge amount of information that can be extracted from the data, including whether the child is actually doing their therapy in the first place, when they are doing it and for how long, as well as changes over time and whether exterior factors have an influence.

“Their progression in terms of their physio performance on different dates is something that we are definitely looking at, and due to the fact that we now have the time stamp of when they have done the physio, we can then gather things like the weather on that day and all sorts of information like that to see if there are links that we would never have seen before.

“Measuring their progression in dealing with CF and environmental factors and lifestyle factors will give researchers and clinicians information on how we might better treat this in future.”

Mr Smith said there were other products for respiratory disorders such as asthma that use apps and gaming, and he is aware of one used clinically for measuring forced expiratory volume (FEV) that uses a game to encourage children to do the exercise, but he believes Pepster has something that the others don’t.

“There’s nothing that combines the gaming and the portable nature of this device,” he said. “With something that they have to do everyday, it differs from an FEV measurement which they might take once every six months.”

Pepster is currently being used in a clinical trial at Mater Hospital, involving 30 patients in total who are given the device for six weeks. They are asked to use it every day for about an hour, which is the typical routine for PEP therapy.

“That should all be wrapped up sometime in November and after that we’ll start to look at some of the clinical implications of the data we have collected,” Mr Smith said.

“Then our goal is to get this device out in the public and into the hands of the people that need it, both here in Australia and anywhere in the world.”

Heart app helps patients keep track of meds and dosage

The Heart Foundation has released a free app for patients to better manage their heart medication dosage and routine.

The My Heart, My Life app aims to help people keep track of and remember to take their medicines. A recent Heart Foundation survey found that 5.5 per cent of people prescribed blood pressure medicines and 16 per cent taking cholesterol medicines were not taking them regularly.

The app, available for iOS and Android phones, also allows users to record and monitor health stats such as weight, waist circumference, blood pressure and cholesterol. Measurements can be stored in list and graph format so patients can see how they are progressing over time.

There is a searchable database of medications which lists the dose and frequency and allows users to set reminders for the best time to take them.

It also has information on heart attack waring signs and a series of healthy recipes.

The Heart Foundation’s national director of cardiovascular health, Rob Grenfell, said the app will help patients manage their medication routine, increase their understanding of their condition and ultimately improve their health.

“We also know the app will assist GPs, pharmacists and primary care nurses to help their patients adhere to medicine and lifestyle changes,” Dr Grenfell said.

The app can be downloaded from the My Heart My Life website.

Open for comment: DoH and RACGP surveys on PCEHR

The Department of Health has devised an online survey to help gauge opinion on the implementation of the recommendations of the PCEHR review as part of its month-long consultation process.

The consultations, being managed on the department’s behalf by Deloitte, will also include a special session at next week’s Health Informatics Conference in Melbourne.

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) is also surveying its members to see which model they prefer for reviewing and uploading pathology and diagnostic imaging reports to the PCEHR, which is scheduled to be up and running by the end of the year.

The department’s PCEHR review survey is broken into three groups: healthcare practitioners, consumers and software vendors.

For practitioners, it asks whether they actively access any of their patient’s records, and if not, why not. On the latter, practitioners are given the option of stating that the PCEHR is not useful to care delivery, it takes too much time to access and any liability concerns, as well as whether patients don’t want them to look the record up.

It asks if the information contained is useful, and what changes practitioners would like to see in the system in order to start using it in a meaningful way.

It also asks what clinical measurements need to be included and what support practitioners need in terms of training to use the system in day-to-day work.

One of the most important recommendations of the Royle review was that the system become opt-out. The survey asks providers their view on the key issues and risks of moving to an opt-out approach, including whether they will remain reluctant to access it because it takes too much time or is not clinically relevant.

They are also asked what they would do if a patient demanded that a shared health summary be uploaded, including an option to refuse the patient’s request.

For consumers, it asks if they have a PCEHR and if so why. If an opt-out model was introduced, it asks how consumers would expect to hear about it and the preferred method for opting out. It also asks what type of information they feel they would need and where to access it, with options including online, printed leaflets or advertising in general practices and hospitals.

For medical software vendors, it covers questions such as the effect on them and their products if an opt-out model was chosen, whether opt-out would make vendors more likely to integrate with the system, and what level of effect the inclusion of extra functionality such as pathology reports will have.

It also asks whether vendors think medical software should comply with eHealth specifications and standards.

The survey is available online until September 1.

The RACGP’s survey asks members for their views on three models being put forward to include pathology and radiology reports on the PCEHR system. The department held meetings in Melbourne recently to update interested parties on progress and to try to come to a consensus on the best way that reports should be uploaded.

Options in the RACGP survey include the requesting doctor reviewing any results and then sending a simple authorisation message (authority to post) to the path lab or imaging provider to upload the report from their system.

Option two involves the pathology lab uploading the results at the same time as they are sent to the requesting doctor, and option three involves the lab uploading the results after a fixed number of days, during which the requesting doctor can send a message to stop the automatic upload.

Medee aims to build digital health technology community

The medical device commercialisation specialists behind digital health company uHealth have launched a new service to provide information on emerging medical technologies to consumers, and have also signed a distribution agreement with the makers of the AliveCor heart monitoring device.

Will Knox and Jeff Reid set up uHealth last year to develop a portfolio of quality, medically validated digital technologies, including the AirSonea asthma device, the WiTouch Pro wireless transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device and the LUMOback posture sensor and mobile app.

They have since added the AliveCor health monitor for iPhone device to their roster. AliveCor is a single-lead ECG device built into an iPhone case that has an accompanying app that can analyse the readings and display them on the phone’s screen.

It has been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and validated in several studies, including for use in community pharmacy to screen for atrial fibrillation, by a team from the University of Sydney led by cardiologist Ben Freedman.

uHealth has also added a new smartphone-based endoscope technology called endoscope-i that it is marketing to ENT specialists, as well as a product developed by UK company Sensium Healthcare that consists of a wireless, disposable patch that monitors vital signs every two minutes and sends an alert to the nurse should the patient deteriorate.

It is also awaiting TGA approval for Dario, an all-in-one glucose meter that plugs into a smartphone and can both measure blood glucose levels and link to a cloud-based diabetes management platform on the user’s smartphone.

As the portfolio of products expands, uHealth has also launched Medee (pronounced Medi and a play on the words ‘medical’ and ‘community’), which Mr Knox describes as a free subscription-based platform that aims to provide health information and news about existing and emerging technologies for common chronic conditions such as diabetes and asthma.

It also plans to target the booming aged care market, both in terms of institutional aged care and devices that will help elderly people stay at home for longer.

“We found over the 12 to 18 months of being in the digital business that there is so much technology out there that can be used and applied to the family at home who are interested in normal health issues as well as chronic diseases, but we found that there was just not enough information available and nor was anyone using portals for them to get access,” Mr Knox said.

“What we wanted to do is create almost like the Cudo or the Living Social of healthcare technology and wrap it up in a package that then informs the consumers about the technology and how it fits in to a particular health issue. At the same time as all of these technologies are becoming available for consumers, there is also a general interest from consumers to know more about them but they don’t have a way of linking the two.”

Mr Knox said Medee is basically an email database of interested consumers and health and technology information that will allow the company to tailor “infomail” packages that can be sent to subscribers.

It will be structured around monthly packages on a particular health issue or chronic disease, with an infomail sent out once a week for three weeks containing information about the chronic disease state itself, how it is traditionally managed, and how particular technologies might fit into a new way of managing those conditions.

The final email will contain obligation-free offers on the technologies at discount prices. All of the technologies featured will be regulated products that are TGA approved and clinically validated, with a team of health experts advising on their quality. This will weed out gimmick devices with no clinical worth, Mr Knox said.

“The message we’re trying to get across is there is a wealth of information out there on the Internet that you can read, but we want to try validate the information as well,” he said. “We want to make sure that the average Australian is given information about these types of diseases and technologies from people who know not only about the disease but about the technology.”

uHealth’s devices will obviously form part of the technologies on offer but Medee will be open to any medical technology that has clinical validation data.

“We’ll check to see if there has been work done from a usability perspective and what we are representing are technologies that we think are validated and have a real problem-solving element to them,” he said.

uHealth is developing a publicity and marketing campaign that will be aimed at people with chronic illnesses but also at mothers, who are the predominant decision-makers in terms of healthcare for most families. Mothers are increasingly making decisions not just for themselves, their children and their partners but for their parents as well.

“What we want to try to do is educate them about some new technologies that are available to help them look after their mums and dads, not only within the aged care structure but also maybe at home or where they are getting to the point where they thinking about [institutional aged care].

“They can see some of these home monitoring products that might not only be available now but we might also give them a taste of the stuff that is coming out in the next couple of years as well.”

Device portfolio

Mr Knox and Mr Reid have both worked in various management and commercialisation roles with medical device companies such as Cochlear and Medtronic. They set up uHealth at the start of last year to put together a portfolio of existing technologies from here and overseas, but also to partner with product developers to bring devices to market.

The company has partnerships with an industrial design company called Katapult Design and device engineering firm Procept Engineering, both based in Australia.

Since then, Mr Knox said the company had built some new arms to the business.

“We have a very heavy focus on the digital consumer healthcare side and what we are trying to is both source and developed leading medical devices that can be used by consumers for the management of chronic disease.

“Unlike some of the other ‘digital health’ areas that focus on wellness and fitness tracking and that kind of stuff, we are much more focused on validated and regulated medical devices.”

In addition to LUMOback and the WiTouch Pro – which both came out of Mr Reid’s background of spinal implant technology – probably the most well-known technology they are distributing is the AirSonea, a beautifully designed and TGA-approved wheeze monitor that also comes with an app that helps track symptoms, triggers, peak flow measurements and medication usage.

The device itself is held against the throat to record levels of wheeze, with the measurements sent through the AsthmaSense app to the AsthmaSense Cloud, where measurements and progress are recorded and can be shared with healthcare providers.

The recent agreement with AliveCor for its device, which was partially designed and engineered in Australia, involves a distribution partnership to sell the device to consumers and to clinicians more easily.

The results of studies by Professor Freedman and his team from the University of Sydney and Concord Clinical School, including PhD work by Nicole Lowres using the device in the community pharmacy and general practice settings, raised a lot of interest when it was published last year.

AliveCor’s electrodes are rested on the fingers of each hand, with the AliveECG app sensing skin contact on the sensors. The app can be set to take 30-second or continuous rhythm strips, which are then stored in the app and sent to a secure server that can automatically analyse the reading.

Professor Freedman’s team found that the website’s automatic prediction was able to correctly diagnose atrial fibrillation 97 per cent of the time.

In addition to AliveCor is the endoscope-i, which Mr Knox said is basically an adaptor for any type of endoscope that is linked to the iPhone.

“The software in the iPhone and the apps lets you store, manage and transfer images and videos from the endoscope,” he said. “Anyone can use it but we are initially going to ear, nose and throat surgeons who have a particular type of rigid endoscope and want to use data to transfer information through to patients.

“The other interesting application for it is in smartphone intubation. That is going to be the next thing that we’re going to be focusing on. They can actually use this for endoscopic intubation, so they can transfer the pictures that they are getting on the scope through the iPhone onto a TV screen within the operating theatre. And all for $200.”

The Dario smart glucose system is still going through the TGA process at the moment but Mr Knox hopes it will be approved soon. Developed by Israeli company LabStyle Innovations, the device includes strips, a lancing device and a smartphone-paired glucose meter.

It connects with a cloud-based diabetes management platform that can be accessed by the user, their carers and their healthcare professionals.

“It has a little attachment that plugs into the headphone jack of your smartphone and through the software application it also has the ability to track symptoms, your insulin, your diet and your calorie intake – all of the information that diabetics are looking for,” Mr Knox said.

“With this software, you can manage your chronic disease on your phone and you can also check your blood glucose using the meter that you plug into the smartphone. We are pretty excited about that one and it is taking up a lot of our time in planning the launch and looking at where we can integrate that into pharmacies.”

Beyond the digital consumer sphere, uHealth has also partnered with UK firm Sensium Healthcare to distribute the SensiumVitals system, developed by Imperial College London biomedical engineer Chris Toumazou, which consists of a wireless technology designed to monitor the vital signs of patients on general wards.

It uses single-use, disposable patches that take readings every two minutes and can automatically send alerts through to the nurses’ station or the hospital IT system.

“Instead of nurses doing rounds every four to six hours to take the vital signs, this will take the vital signs every two minutes,” he said. “If there are any alerts or parameters that the vitals are going above or below, it can then send an alert by text message, email or to a paging system. You can catch the deteriorating patient earlier.”

The Dario device should be available in June or July, and interested parties can sign up to Medee now.

Community Telco targets healthcare as first sector to natr

Telecommunications company Community Telco will launch its new cloud-based video conferencing solution natr at the Australian Telehealth Conference (ATC) later this month.

natr (pronounced ‘natter’) is a secure, managed solution using LifeSize’s UVC platform, amongst others, and a virtualised suite of video conferencing products including ClearSea for mobile devices. ClearSea is also available on the desktop and is interoperable with other standards-based equipment such as Polycom and Cisco.

For natr, the point of difference will be its 24/7 localised support, using existing data storage and network infrastructure from Community Telco, a community-based telecoms company that is part of the Bendigo and Adelaide Bank Group, which reinvests a percentage of profits back into community projects.

natr product founder, Gareth Hagebols, said the platform would provide all of the video conferencing infrastructure required for telehealth, including bridging, recording, streaming, multiparty calling and scheduling of meetings, as a virtualised, managed solution.

“Currently we are partnering with LifeSize for our enterprise solution,” Mr Hagebols said. “This consists of a range of video infrastructure as a service (VIaaS) products which are supported locally.

“We also provide the network connectivity and hosted servers required to operate natr where needed. Our aim is not to deliver the biggest video platform in the country, but to offer a higher level of local dedicated support, better assisting clients with implementation of their solutions, rather than just selling them a product.”

Community Telco has been providing full telecoms services for over 10 years and has been active in the healthcare market for about five. It has chosen healthcare as the launch sector for natr following successful trials late last year.

“There is a huge potential and a number of use cases for these products in the healthcare industry,” Mr Hagebols said. “There are obvious benefits to the industry through utilising telehealth and we already have some partners in that sector, so it is a nice fit for us.”

He said Community Telco had noticed several years ago that a lot of video conferencing infrastructure products were being virtualised and saw that as an opportunity to change the way it was delivering its VC solutions.

“It is also a change in the way in which we are doing business internally ourselves,” he said. “From a national and global perspective, there is a greater need to change the way organisations do business. Virtualisation is an opportunity for everyone to be able to take part in this without the need for large capital outlay.”

natr will work on iOS and Android devices and on Windows or OSX on the desktop. Scheduling for multiparty calls can be handled by an Outlook interface, and there is also scheduling capability through natr’s call centre.

“It is another level of service and support where we take the responsibility for the resource drain away from the medical receptionist and do some of that for them,” he said.

While the majority of general practitioners use Skype, natr will be a managed service that has more in common with boutique online video conferencing companies like Arkadin or Blue Jeans. However, Mr Hagebols said natr would provide more local support and client interface as it can use the resources of Community Telco’s local call centres and technicians.

“We’ve retrained our staff in assisting and supporting the video conferencing products and on natr, so essentially we are expanding on the resources we already have in place,” he said.

Pricing will be competitive with other telco offerings, and natr is currently looking for industry-based opportunities to reinvest funds in the same way Community Telco does with its other telecoms services.

“We essentially provide margin shares or income streams back into community organisations from the revenue the clients spend anyway,” he said. “Our healthcare play will see us provide a community benefit but it will be an industry benefit as opposed to the traditional community.

“We are still fleshing this out at the moment but it will be along the lines of providing subsidies for training possibly and perhaps linking in with universities or healthcare service providers.”

natr’s initial partners for its enterprise offering are LifeSize, Samsung and Firefly, and the company will have a shared infrastructure offer releasing in the first quarter of the 2014/15 financial year, which will give smaller organisations the opportunity to use the video conferencing solutions for a small monthly subscription and no start-up costs.

The Australian Telehealth Conference is being held in Melbourne on March 19 and 20.

Aged care looks for government investment in ICT

The Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC) has called on the federal government to provide a one-off investment in the aged care sector to upgrade its ICT capabilities.

Launching its Digital Care Services IT blueprint (pdf) in Canberra yesterday, the ACIITC – a joint venture between Aged & Community Services Australia (ACSA) and Leading Age Services Australia (LASA) – argued that government funding had enabled pharmacists and general practitioners to upgrade ICT systems, which had benefited all Australians.

The blueprint is a further development of the IT roadmap created by the Pathfinder project, which was set up in 2012 to investigate what systems and processes would be required to get the aged care industry involved in using the PCEHR.

Led by the ACIITC, a report on Pathfinder was handed in to the Department of Health over 18 months ago, but has never been released.

The council argues in its new blueprint that with demand for aged care set to soar – an estimated 1.6 million people will require some sort of aged service by 2023 – ICT was essential to helping the entire system deliver high quality and accessible care.

Workforce requirements are also a concern, with the Productivity Commission predicting that the aged care workforce needs to grow to 900,000 by 2045. ACSA CEO John Kelly said a workforce of this size was not achievable.

“However, universal deployment of ICT systems could effectively reduce this predicted growth to comfortably justify the investment,” Professor Kelly said.

“Providers are always looking for better ways to manage their workforce to give the highest quality care to some of Australia’s most vulnerable people, our elderly who need care. IT investment maximises the opportunity for innovation in the way services are delivered.

“Up to 80 per cent of services will be delivered directly to people in their homes in the future and this environment provides the opportunity to maximise cost effective investments in ICT systems.”

Developed in association with Accenture, the blueprint states that the cost of inaction would be high for aged care providers, consumers, carers and the community.

“If the system does not embrace the use of ICT, it risks the loss of the ability to offer high-quality, accessible care. This could not only fail those directly involved, but result in additional adverse pressures on the Australian community in general.”

The blueprint states that governments can help foster investment in infrastructure for innovation and solutions that can be scaled across the industry, similar to providing seed funding as it has with pharmacies and general practice.

The ACIITC said it had identified a number of key areas that should be prioritised, including eHealth, telehealth and mobility, care management, management information and reporting, and core technology and support.

The blueprint states that aged care providers need to evaluate their current ICT arrangements and work with software vendors and developers to ensure they have the right capabilities in place.

“To ensure this approach is successful, providers may need to make sure board members and advisers with substantial ICT experience are involved,” it says. It also argues that providers may need to boost their ICT spend from less than two per cent today to four to five per cent of gross revenue to provide a sound level of ICT investment.

“Government should focus on creating a framework that enables the industry to change and adapt, including consistent government policies and investments. In addition, government should work closely with the industry peak bodies to develop pilot programs and ensure the outcomes are disseminated across the industry.

“This requires a scalable investment approach as opposed to the current ad hoc spending approach to aged care ICT investments.”