DoH secretary signals move to integrated, mobile healthcare data

Opening up the My Health Record to mobile devices and apps will raise “a world of great opportunities” through new technologies and analytical services that are now reaching an exciting maturity, the secretary of the federal Department of Health (DoH) says.

DoH secretary Martin Bowles told the New York eHealth Collaborative Forum at the New York Academy of Sciences last week that there was a significant role for information technology in the government’s health reform plans, from opening up the My Health Record (MyHR, formerly PCEHR) to interact securely with mobile devices to allowing healthcare data collected by the government to be shared through a user friendly portal with technology developers and systems designers.

Mr Bowles said he saw the role of the department as helping to evolve and enable national infrastructure in a way that “allows innovative healthcare service providers and software companies to pick up the ball”.

“We need to be open to these new approaches and understand what might be possible as the company who may come up with the next great innovation may not even exist today,” Mr Bowles said.

“The creation of permission cultures is important. Permission to try different things and sometimes fail is critical to success.”

The department announced last month that it planned to make the MyHR mobile-compatible next year, allowing app developers access to the platform through a set of conformant APIs.

Mr Bowles said the functions of the system are also being steadily expanded although he acknowledged consumers had been slow to take up the system and providers even slower.

“[We] have a long way to go to get national coverage of doctors and patients actively using the system,” Mr Bowles said. “We can do better. We need to better understand how consumers want to interact with the healthcare system.

“We have seen big shifts in this in the banking and services sectors and enablers in the app market so by mid-2016 the My Health Record system will be able to interact securely with mobile devices.

“Having the My Health Record system accessible by mobile devices and apps raises a world of great opportunities from new technology and analytical health services which are reaching an exciting maturity right now.”

He also said consumers were increasingly using wearable technologies to help them manage their own health and wellbeing, and he believed there were opportunities for consumers to choose to connect their wearable and other personal health technology to their My Health Record to send information to it, or provide access to information in it.

“Consumers will be able to choose to use their health information to personalise health services to their individual needs, including how the information might be integrated with the data from their mobile and wearable devices,” he said.

“The power of this integrated data, combined with the computational and analytical capacity of third party vendors, will improve capacity to predict health outcomes and provide proactive personalised advice to the consumer and their carers.”

Mr Bowles also signalled opening up data that the department already collects to third parties through a web portal was on the cards.

“Our Medicare system and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme provide excellent data on use of healthcare services … [but] we do not use it to its full potential,” he said.

“This is partly because of the complexity. But it is also because different parts of the system own and protect the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule, Medicare benefits, private, and public hospital data and have tended to block, rather than clear the way for, data sharing.”

He said that when he was first appointed he asked whether he could provide PBS and MBS data to the states and territories and was given “100 pages of legal advice around privacy explaining why this was impossible”.

“When I then said – I want to do this. How could we make it happen? I received just four pages of advice. They now have the data. You need to ask the right question.”

While the department’s main thinking on data has been focused on privacy, he believes there is a great deal of data that is not really private, data that is in aggregate and de-identified, that should just be openly available to researchers and others and become a foundation for policy discussions.

The Atlas of Healthcare Variation released by Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care last week was one example in which data could be analysed to reduce waste or outdated or unnecessary treatments such as the overuse of antimicrobials and psychotropic medicines, he said.

“In the immediate future, this atlas will be very helpful to the 31 new Primary Health Networks that have been set up in every part of Australia. These networks are commissioners of service for their defined population. They are a major step forward to creating a single, coordinated health system from the complex array of stovepiped health systems that we now have.”

To do their jobs properly, data needs to be at the centre of the PHNs’ business operations, but this data is not only useful for policy makers, he said.

“[We] are moving to make this data easily available beyond traditional government partners. I have asked that data is accessible through a user friendly website/portal that can be used by innovators, both in technology development, but in systems design that Primary Health Networks could use to commission more efficient and effective health services.

“Better information leads to better understanding of our system and therefore to better health care at every level.

“Instead of focusing on health services data on payments or as a way of catching out doctors, we can now use it for insights into doctor and consumer behaviours to better understand what is affecting health outcomes.

“We have a way to go but we will continue to push the boundaries because it is one of the important issues for us to conquer.”

Precedence expands cdmNet platform following sale to Sonic

Care coordination specialist Precedence Health Care has launched a new cloud-based coordinated care platform designed to support plug-in application services and the full continuum of care following its recent acquisition by the primary care division of Sonic Healthcare.

Sonic has purchased 100 per cent of the Melbourne-based company, and it will now form part of Sonic Clinical Services, which also includes other well-known assets such as the Independent Practitioner Network (IPN) of medical centres.

Precedence Health Care’s CEO Michael Georgeff said he had been in discussions with Sonic Clinical Services’ CEO Malcolm Parmenter for some time about forming a strategic relationship aimed at contributing to the national health agenda, which then turned into an agreement to buy the company outright.

“It doesn’t really change what we do and we are continuing to run as an independent company … but what it gives to us is two substantial gains,” Professor Georgeff said.

“One is we are backed by Sonic’s financial strength, so that enables us to develop and deploy things in ways that we would have been unable to do without it, and secondly, it gives us that clinical arm of Sonic that will help us push through the health reform agenda in a way that is much harder when you are just a vendor.

“I think we can really make a change to healthcare because we can get adoption of the technologies much more rapidly.”

Precedence Health Care is best known for the cdmNet chronic disease care planning system predominantly used by GPs to develop general practice management plans (GPMPs) and team care arrangements (TCAs), allowing allied health practitioners and other members of a patient’s care team to access a shared care plan.

However, Professor Georgeff said that over the last year or so, Precedence had moved beyond its original market to develop what it calls a coordinated care platform that links the patient to the continuum of providers, including GPs, nurses, allied health, specialists, pharmacists, community and indigenous health centres, hospitals and aged care facilities.

One of the platform’s points of difference is that it has the ability to track and manage actions – long a downfall of GPMPs, which often sit in a drawer and are forgotten – but it has also been designed on an open architecture to allow third-party plug-ins and application services such as care planning and management, consumer-directed care (CDC), practice profiling and population intelligence services.

“For a long time in healthcare we have focused on the shared health record for supporting multidisciplinary care and reducing care fragmentation,” Professor Georgeff said. “However, the key to longitudinal care is knowing what everyone on the care team should be doing and what they are doing, and being able to follow up and intervene when things are not going to plan.

“While it is important to know the status of the patient – their health record – it is even more important to know how everyone on the care team is working together to improve the health outcomes of the patient.”

The cdmNet platform includes libraries of customisable care plans, guidelines and workflows to help automate the clinical and administrative tasks involved in collaborative care, including all Medicare compliance and paperwork.

Professor Georgeff said these workflows enable the platform to support many different models of care, from the “medical home” to CDC, and they also dramatically improve the productivity of the care team.

Now it will also add other user services and applications to plug into the platform through web services and standard interfaces such as FHIR.

The cdmNet platform is already being used by Medibank for the CarePoint, CareFirst and CareTransition programs that are being rolled out nationally, which Medibank says will deliver better care for people living with chronic conditions by enabling integrated care and coordinated support for patients. IPN is also rolling out the platform across its practices nationwide.

The Movember Foundation also uses the platform to help coordinate the care of men with prostate cancer as part of the largest men’s health project in the world.

The platform also links to Apple Health and most remote monitors on the market, such as Fitbits and Withings, so it can automatically track patient metrics in real time and share these with the patient’s care team.

“Despite the huge number of mobile health solutions entering the health and fitness sector, very few connect to the patient’s care providers,” Professor Georgeff said. “This just leads to more fragmentation of the healthcare system.”

Other application services include telehealth, care coordination, health service provisioning, budgeting, aged care and health analytics services.

The company also plans to work with PHNs as the platform can collect data across the whole care continuum at a very fine-grained level, he said.

“If you are picking up the GP data, that is obviously valuable, but to pick up data across allied health, specialists, across public and private, gives a very comprehensive picture of coordinated care which is where the PHNs are focused. Much of that we are doing quite independently of Sonic and some of that we are doing with Sonic.”

Professor Georgeff also sees huge potential in the aged care market, both residential and community based, particularly following the introduction of CDC.

One of its clients is Southern Cross Care WA, which is piloting the cdmNet platform to optimise service planning, track service delivery and seamlessly integrate with providers in the primary care and acute sectors.

“The genesis [of the platform] is the same idea that started off the GP system – our belief that apart from the fragmentation of care, the real problem in healthcare is lack of follow-up and knowing what everyone is meant to be doing in their care of the patient,” he said.

“We see a shared health record as a key part of co-ordinated care, but tracking actions and managing notes and coordinating those, knowing what people should be doing and what they have done, is where the problems lie.

“That is where our focus is – the coordinated care platform manages all of the plans, the activities and the workflows of all of the providers and the patient. Into that we then plug in a whole lot of application services, not only ours but potentially other vendors.”

He said the idea behind the platform is twofold: one is to get rid of the fragmentation of care by enabling connectivity across the care continuum, which is not much different from what Precedence was achieving with the GP system, but also then to plug in a whole lot of application and services in different areas.

“One of those application services is the old cdmNet but we have then plugged in a range of others for coordinated care where an organisation such as Medibank wants to act as a care coordinator or care facilitator,” he said.

“We have a plug-in that enables the care coordinator to bring in the care team and manage the whole team proactively. We are doing that for both Medibank and Movember.”

The plan is now to connect up many different health application services that do things Precedence doesn’t supply. “For example, if somebody has a medication management module then that can plug in also,” he said.

“We don’t aim to be the only coordinated care platform so potentially if others come along we can connect to those as well. The whole idea is a network of application services, and our focus is on tracking and managing what the care team are doing.

“No individual organisation or vendor is going to make a difference by themselves. If we are to overcome the challenges we have today in healthcare, we have to work together.”

Precedence plans to release some new application services in the first quarter of 2016, including cdmNet Practice Profiler for practice audit and profiling, and cdmNet Population Health, an extensive analytics service backed by SAP BusinessObjects.

“These new application services go beyond existing tools because they track what happens across the full care team, identify service delivery gaps and link these to patient outcomes,” he said.

Letter to the editor: eHealth – where we are now

I have just returned from the AMIA scientific meeting with great enthusiasm as to how health professionals can use e-health solutions to improve care provision to patients. Each day since returning I have been looking for opportunities in my own workplace to complete the e-health puzzle.

Today I was reminded just how far we are from completing the puzzle but we must persist as technology can help.

My 15-year-old son is away with friends, approximately five hours from home. Unfortunately he experienced a recurrence of an allergic dermatitis and so he called me for advice. I was able to confirm the diagnosis by an image he was able to capture on his smartphone and send to me via MMS. This was so easy. All I needed to do now was to organise topical steroid medication from a local pharmacy.

As he is a 15-year-old male, he did not really take much notice where the campsite was, but being quite savvy, he used the location point on Google Maps to give me the closest town. Perfect! Once I had a postcode I looked up the BetterHealth website (such a valuable resource) and found that there was no pharmacy where he was staying, but I had 6 pharmacies in the neighbouring towns with contact details and opening hours.

Fortunately one of the adults staying with my son was in one of those towns and so I contacted the pharmacy that he was standing next to. Yes the medication I needed was in stock so I was asked to fax the script. Having got rid of my fax in 1995, I negotiated scanning the script and the Medicare Card and sending them by email. No problem, all sent, and I even organised to pay for the medication over the phone.

At the end of the phone call, and feeling quite proud of the whole process, I was reminded to send the original script by mail. Not sure why but I dusted off the box of envelopes, looked up the Australia Post website to find out how much a stamp costs, and will travel to the post office on Monday to send the script.

We have a lot of simple things already to help us but there are still simple things that are yet to be resolved.

Dr Mark Santamaria is an emergency physician from Melbourne.

Australasian health IT week in review: November 7

Pulse+IT’s weekly round-up of Australian and New Zealand health, IT and eHealth news:

Kiwi concussion testing software wins Samsung Springboard
stuff.co.nz ~ Tao Lin ~ 06/11/2015

A Kiwi tech company whose concussion software was used at the Rugby World Cup has won the Samsung Springboard competition.


WA auditors guess govt database passwords on first attempt
iTNews ~ Paris Cowan ~ 06/11/2015

WA’s office of the Auditor General was able to break into two sensitive state government networks by successfully guessing on the first attempt that the passwords for the admin account were ‘password’.


Quigley strikes back on NBN costs
The Australian ~ Mark Gregory ~ 04/11/2015

Former NBN Co boss Mike Quigley is back and the man who rather gamely took on the challenge of getting Australia’s biggest infrastructure off the ground has more than a few things to say.


New CIO at Orion Health
CIO ~ Divina Paredes ~ 03/11/2015

Johan Vendrig is the new CIO at Orion Health, filling the role vacated by David Kennedy in May. Kennedy is now a CIO/CISO consultant.


How to improve clinical software
Medical Observer ~ Oliver Frank ~ 03/11/2015

Practice software: address books need to reflect the reality of current practice.


Homecare Medical launches new telehealth service
NZ Doctor ~ Ruth Brown ~ 02/11/2015

A new national telehealth service was officially launched over the weekend with staff fielding nearly 2000 calls.


Turnbull’s faster, cheaper NBN
ABC News ~ Paddy Manning ~ 01/11/2015

When Malcolm Turnbull dumped Labor’s fibre optic NBN and replaced it with a mix of old and new technologies, he pledged a faster and cheaper broadband network. But the project is already slower and more expensive than promised.


Government belatedly releases PCEHR trial site selection criteria

The federal government has released the selection criteria for potential trial sites of opt-out models for the PCEHR, despite promises that it would have the chosen sites agreed to and announced last month.

The criteria appear to downgrade the original targets of up to one million people per site to between 250,000 and 500,000 people each, and call for areas that have a higher than average PCEHR uptake by providers.

The criteria indicate that areas such as the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory are likely to be on the shortlist, along with previous eHealth sites such as Hunter New England, although the criterion for a clearly defined geographical area might rule out metro areas such as the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, northern Brisbane and the eastern and western suburbs of Sydney.

Regional areas with large urban centres such as Queensland’s Darling Downs or Victoria’s Barwon region have also been mooted as potential sites.

The criteria call for:

According to the government, its new strategy for the PCEHR – soon to be renamed the My Health Record – responds to a number of key recommendations of the 2013 review into the PCEHR.

This includes “strengthening eHealth governance and operations by establishing an Australian Commission for eHealth to manage governance, operation and ongoing delivery for national eHealth systems”.

The announcement of a steering committee for a taskforce to establish this commission has also been delayed, although the names of most of its members have been leaked to Pulse+IT.

It also includes “improving system usability and the clinical content of records” – currently being undertaken by NEHTA through its clinical usability program (CUP) but derided by several medical software vendors – and “revising incentives”, including changes to the changes to the Practice Incentives Program eHealth incentive (ePIP), which Pulse+IT understands will be fiercely opposed by general practice.

Much emphasis has been placed on training and re-educating healthcare providers in the use of the system, with the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association (AHHA) recently being awarded a contract to provide this training.

The trial sites are due to start in April next year and while they will test the requirements for an opt-out system, they are also expected to look at voluntary systems to improve uptake.

The government has set aside $51 million for the operation of the sites.

Health information peak bodies join forces for workforce summit

Australia’s three peak health information organisations have formalised their co-presentation of a Health Information Workforce Summit to be held in Sydney later this month.

The Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) is the latest to formalise its commitment to the summit, along with the Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI) and event organiser the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA).

New Zealand will also be represented. ACHI president, adjunct associate professor Klaus Veil, said college fellow Karen Day, program director for health informatics at the University of Auckland, had been invited to address the summit and provide a cross-Tasman view of the issue and possible solutions.

HIMAA president Sallyanne Wissmann said all three peak bodies hoped that the summit would provide an action plan to address the health information management workforce shortage and configuration challenges, as highlighted by the 2013 Health Workforce Australia (HWA) health information workforce report.

“[A] coordinated voice by the three peak bodies in health information will have the most to offer industry and government in navigating what is going to be an exciting journey, but one that depends on informed processes to lead to quality outcomes,” Ms Wissmann said.

HISA CEO Louise Schaper said the three organisations had worked together successfully to develop the Certified Health Informatician Australasia (CHIA) credential, which she said was an important foundation development for a range of professional entry points in health informatics.

“Australia now has over 100 certified health informaticians, but that is just scratching the surface,” Dr Schaper said. “Workforce and skills shortages in health informatics is a substantial barrier in implementing national and local eHealth programs.”

Dr Schaper will present on the CHIA credential in the workforce section of the summit, while ACHI will outline the tertiary education pathways and HIMAA will present on the challenges of career development in a changing professional environment.

Mr Veil said a coordinated approach to the various education pathways was necessary.

“Clear career paths will provide certainty for industry in clarifying workforce configuration; they will also assist professionals with their career choices,” he said.

There is also the issue of health information occupations themselves, with Ms Wissmann calling for a clearly identified unit grouping in the Australia and New Zealand Standard Classifications of Occupations (ANZSCO).

“These are just a few of the complexities that will be discussed on 30 October,” Ms Wissmann said.

“We’ve had positive interest from the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council’s health workforce principal committee, with whom the HWA report currently sits, and from the NSW government. We look forward to welcoming these and other jurisdictions to the summit.”

The summit will be held at the Dockside convention centre in Sydney’s Darling Harbour on Friday, October 30, from 10am to 4pm.

Registration is now open and is free for HIMAA, HISA and ACHI members.

Survey on mobile technology adoption in general practice

The RACGP is running a survey to gauge the uptake of technology in general practice, calling on GPs, practice managers, practice nurses and allied health professionals to have their say.

Predominantly dealing with mobile device adoption rather than information technology, the survey aims to help the college understand what systems are being used, what future investment is needed and what are the key technology challenges faced by general practice teams.

It asks questions about whether the respondent is using technology in patient care as much as they would like, what is the biggest influence on adoption of technology and what are the main barriers that restrict the use of technology in practice.

Barriers could include lack of leadership related to technology use in the practice, lack of actual technological devices, insufficient support on how to use technology, integration with current processes and integration with IT.

It also asks how often the respondent uses mobile devices for patient-related work, how confident they are in using mobile devices compared to two years ago and five years ago, and the respondent’s thoughts on whether mobile devices increase productivity, make it easier to access patient data or make it easier to record patient information.

Devices mentioned include desktop computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones and video conferencing.

Importantly, the survey asks what type of practice or patient information can currently be accessed from the respondent’s smartphone or tablet – such as EMRs, alerts from clinical systems, secure messaging, test results, drug references or remote monitoring – and then asks what type of practice or patient information the respondent would like to be able to access for their device.

Other questions include how often the practice communicates with patients via traditional and electronic means, the methods used – such as websites, email, text, online appointments, web portals or video conferencing – and whether the respondent uses apps or portable consumer devices like heart rate monitors with patients.

The survey closes on November 30.

Telstra Health’s ConnectingCare links to Argus for national secure messaging

Telstra Health’s wholly owned subsidiary HealthConnex is set to launch a new version of its ConnectingCare secure messaging and referral platform for community care organisations that is interoperable with the Argus secure messaging service widely used by GPs.

ConnectingCare is a web-based platform aimed at community care organisations and allied health practitioners who don’t have a clinical system but who want to send and receive standardised eReferrals and other clinical documents securely.

Initially developed for Victoria’s Primary Care Partnerships (PCP) program, HealthConnex acquired ConnectingCare in 2012 and has since worked to align it with the National Health Services Directory (NHSD), which HealthConnex supports on behalf of Healthdirect Australia.

HealthConnex managing director Peter Young said ConnectingCare was now synchronised with the NHSD, meaning it can be offered nationally. And by connecting to Argus, community organisations and GPs can send and receive referrals and other documents without having to subscribe to both platforms.

Mr Young said the new system was also using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard to allow other documents to be uploaded and exchanged. It was originally developed to use the Victorian Department of Health & Human Services’ service coordination tool templates (SCTT, pronounced ‘Scott’) specification, which allows service providers and the department to electronically share standardised information.

SCTT is aligned to HL7, but the use of the templates was a constraint on the system being used on a national scale, Mr Young said.

“The ConnectingCare platform was developed primarily to enable community care agencies and health services to send information by secure email technology,” Mr Young said. “The idea behind ConnectingCare was that you didn’t need a clinical system driving it as it was basically a portal.

“You could go on to the portal, you could create a referral, you could attach a file and send it to the destination, and the destination would use the secure email technology. There were more than 100 or 150 agencies using it.

“Now, somebody can go onto ConnectingCare and create a referral and that file can be sent to Argus users, so that links in the GPs to the network. It means that subscribers to the ConnectingCare service will nationally be linked with Argus users.

“And because it is no longer tied to the SCTT template, we can use the FHIR standard for organisations to create templates. There is lot more flexibility in how it’s used and that positions this as a national facility.”

ConnectingCare sends an acknowledgement so users can track what happened to the referral, but it doesn’t store any system data about the referral itself, Mr Young said.

“It is a facility to exchange information, but the metadata is stored in the database so that you can go back and see that there was a referral sent by somebody to somebody and they received it and they responded. That provides an audit log that you can use to track the success or not of the referral.”

In addition to linking it to the NHSD and Argus to provide a national platform, HealthConnex has updated the user interface in the new version of ConnectingCare.

“We got UX/UI people in to update it from the old interface,” Mr Young said. “It’s now a classic, modern, cloud-based interface.”

HealthConnex will officially launch the new version of ConnectingCare later this week.

Malaysia and Thailand take on Singapore for high-tech medical crown

Singapore has long been considered one of the leading hubs in Asia for medical tourism, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) ranking it as the sixth best country in the world and the best in Asia for patient-centric healthcare.

In the last few years, however, the dynamics have changed and countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, China and India are improving their healthcare infrastructure to compete with Singapore to become Asia’s most popular medical tourism destination.

While Singapore still hosts one of the most sophisticated, high-end healthcare architecture, it’s taking a hit in terms of value, with higher pricing premiums and the availability of cheaper and equivalent healthcare services in neighbouring countries providing stiff competition.

Higher salaries for clinicians, exorbitant real-estate prices and substantial investment in state-of-the-art medical equipment has increased the overall cost of medical care.

A recent report compiled by Patients Beyond Borders positions Singapore as Asia’s most expensive medical tourism destination, and according to BMI Research, a heart bypass costs 41 per cent more in Singapore than Thailand, and over 106 per cent when compared to Malaysia.

Singapore has seen a 25 per cent decrease in the number of patients year-on-year, with its medical tourism revenues dropping from $US1 billion to $832 million in 2013. Malaysia, on the other hand, reported compound annual growth of 29.3 per cent in patient arrivals that year.

Malaysia and Thailand are also actively promoting medical tourism, increasing healthcare standards and leveraging the power of advanced healthcare technologies to deliver high-end medical procedures at cost-effective rates.

Thailand’s long-established tourist credentials, combined with a rapidly escalating healthcare architecture, makes it one of the top destinations in south-east Asia for patients eyeing cost-effective, quality medical facilities. It now receives 1.4 million medical tourists a year compared to 600,000 for Singapore.

Malaysia, however, is now leading in terms of patient throughput, and is expected to receive more than 1.9 million tourists in the next five years. Malaysia was named as the Medical Travel Destination of the Year 2015 by the International Medical Travel Journal.

Pulse+IT spoke to Sherene Azli, CEO of the Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC), about the growth of medical tourism in Asian countries like Malaysia, and the steps MHTC has been taking to increase the number of patients.

What do you think makes Malaysia one of the most popular medical tourist destinations in the world?

Malaysia has been working actively towards strengthening its healthcare system by encouraging public-private relationships (PPPs) to improve accessibility and affordability of quality healthcare services for patients across the globe. We are strengthening our technological infrastructure and also supporting it with a good regulatory framework to ensure that we provide the best medical services.

For countries like Singapore, the biggest challenge is delivering quality healthcare at affordable pricing. How do you think Malaysia is solving the challenge of keeping the operating costs low?

Every country has its own challenges. For us, the biggest challenge is to provide an equitable ecosystem for patients, and ensure that they get the best healthcare facilities. We currently have more than 220 private equipped hospitals that provide expert treatments in the fields of cardiology, fertility, dentistry, ophthalmology, orthopaedics, and neurology. We also have a higher-than-average availability of qualified of medical personnels to ensure that patients get proper attention.

I believe that affordability of our services stems from the fact that we are a competitive manufacturing and service economy in Asia that has a slightly lower cost-of-living when compared to our neighbouring countries. We also have tight regulations in place to ensure that healthcare providers and physicians charge patients reasonably for medical services.

What do you think is the role of healthcare technologies in supporting Malaysia’s medical tourism industry?

Malaysia is actively looking towards adapting modern, state-of-the-art medical devices and healthcare technologies. We’re looking to use advanced digital healthcare solutions like telehealth, mHealth and EHRs to bring down the operating costs, while improving patient care and optimising outcomes. We believe that investing in medical technologies would eventually strengthen our position as the leading healthcare provider, thereby enticing more patients to our country.

Apart for adapting technology, we’re also training more specialists, nurses and healthcare personnel in medical technologies to ensure that we can leverage their full potential, and serve more patients annually.

Singapore has been known for providing top-notch medical facilities, with some of its hospitals gaining international accreditation. How is Malaysia placed on this front?

We’ve been working towards improving our healthcare infrastructure, in order to deliver quality and effective healthcare.

Tropicana Medical Centre, National Heart Institute, Pantai Hospitals, KPJ Healthcare, Mahkota Medical Centre, Darul Ehsan Medical Centre and Gleneagles Medical Centre Penang are some of the private hospitals in Malaysia to have gained international accreditation.

In fact, Malaysia’s Sunway Medical Centre emerged as the first hospital in the south-east Asian region to be awarded with international accreditation from the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS).

Our hospitals have also received internationally recognised awards, including International Medical Travel Journal Medical Travel Awards 2015, Reader’s Digest Asia Gold Trusted Brand Award 2015, and Frost & Sullivan’s Malaysia Excellence Awards 2015.

What are some of the challenges that Malaysia faces as it looks to encourage medical tourism on its home ground?

Every country has its own challenges. Our government’s inclined towards prioritising healthcare facilities for its citizens over foreigners, which I think is pretty obvious. But, then, we are flexing our private healthcare facilities to ensure that we can cater to the large number of patients that visit us every year.

I also feel that we have been a little late in this industry, compared to other players in the region, which means we need to scale up quickly to provide competitive healthcare facilities.

That being said, we believe that healthcare is not a commodity, which is the reason we don’t actively promote it. We tend to look at healthcare from a holistic perspective, where we believe in creating rich patient experiences.

So, our biggest challenge is to constantly improve our healthcare infrastructure, train our workforce in new technologies and streamline our regulatory policies to ensure that we’re the leading destination in the world for providing quality and affordable healthcare.

MedicalDirector wins contract for Victorian Clinicians’ Health Channel

Clinical software vendor MedicalDirector has been appointed as the new service provider for the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services’ Clinicians’ Health Channel (CHC).

The CHC is an online clinical information portal that provides access to healthcare information resources for doctors, nurses, pharmacists, allied health professionals and health librarians working in the Victorian public health system, including drug and poisons information, medical research databases, medical and nursing journals, clinical guidelines and point of care tools.

First established in 2000, it has been provided for many years by US-based information services provider EBSCO, which won a long-term contract in 2009 in association with MIMS and clinical publishers to provide web-based access to content, including Medline, CINAHL Plus and Dynamed. EBSCO also introduced the OpenAthens authentication system.

DHHS issued a tender for a new managing agent in February, which was subsequently won by MedicalDirector, better known as one of the leading providers of general practice clinical and practice management software.

However, MedicalDirector has a thriving publications business, including its own medicines information resource AusDI, as well as licenses to distribute resources such as the Map of Medicine and the Australian Medicines Handbook and AMH Aged Care Companion.

MedicalDirector has developed a new look website for the service that went live on September 6, along with new search functionalities and the ability to access the Ovid databases.

The contract is for three years and will see MedicalDirector increase the number of resources available to clinicians for point-of-care decision making, as well as research, ongoing professional development, a dedicated training resource and a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week help desk.

MedicalDirector CEO Phil Offer said in a statement that the company’s aim was to lift clinicians’ confidence in the quality of the content.

“We look forward to re-establishing our partnership with DHHS and aligning our services and solutions to the broader strategic framework of the department’s ICT strategy,” Mr Offer said.