Practice manager accounts added to MEDrefer

Online referral service MEDrefer has added new functionality for practice managers to its system, allowing them to handle incoming referrals for all of a practice’s specialists.

MEDrefer was launched early last year as a streamlined system that allows GPs to refer patients to up to five appropriate specialists electronically, with specialists able to accept or reject the referral at the click of a button and a notification sent back immediately to the GP.

In the original release, MEDrefer required each practitioner to sign up for their own account. The new release allows one practice manager and as many front-desk staff as required to sign up to manage the referrals.

MEDrefer is fully integrated into Best Practice and works with Genie and other clinical and practice management software via the MEDrefer Manager, which is currently in beta.

MEDrefer managing director Brian Sullivan said this new Windows application for specialist practices works in the background to check for incoming referrals, then delivers them in H7 format, allowing them to be automatically imported to most clinical packages.

“The new practice manager accounts allow practice managers or receptionists to act on behalf of the practitioners in their practice for everything other than the issuing of referrals,” Mr Sullivan said.

“The practice manager can then update the availability of the doctor manually, or directly from the Genie appointment book. It puts the practice manager in control and that’s the way most specialist practices like it. The practice manager registers his or herself rather than the specialist.”

MEDrefer has also developed a registration wizard that lets practice managers set up their practice, listing all their practitioners’ profiles to receive referrals. When the report is ready, the practice manager just needs to click reply to send the report, or alternatively send a Did Not Attend notification.

Specialists and allied health practitioners who don’t have practice management software can still use the system as it is fully online. All they need is an internet connected computer and an email address, Mr Sullivan said.

While the idea is to replace paper referrals, MEDrefer is still considering setting up autofax capability, as many specialists still prefer to receive referrals by fax.

While it has always been free for GPs to use, there is a small cost to specialists. The system was launched with a charge for each referral accepted, but has now changed to a subscription model. It will now cost $15 per month or $150 per year for unlimited referrals, Mr Sullivan said.

In the future, MEDrefer is looking to expand into aged care and the company is also exploring the nascent telehealth market with the potential to use MEDrefer as a referral system for specialists who do telehealth. Mr Sullivan said.

In the meantime, the company is putting more attention on allied health.

“Allied health is where the company is really concentrating on now,” he said. “While MEDrefer spent a lot of time building up a directory of GPs and specialists, we only have about 4000 of the estimated 50,000 allied health practitioners, and allied health lives or dies by referrals.”

PCEHR five goes live as PHN tenders released

Release five of the PCEHR has gone live, featuring two new capabilities in the clinical documents section to view diagnostic imaging and pathology reports.

As expected, the government’s preferred model that pathology and DI reports will be automatically loaded after seven days has gone ahead, with a notice to consumers informing them that reports will be viewable in seven days from the date that the pathologist or diagnostic imaging provider has loaded the report.

However, actual reports will not be able to be uploaded through pathology and diagnostic imaging software until early next year.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health (DoH) said the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) was working with pathology and diagnostic imaging services so reports can be posted directly to the PCEHR, along with software vendors.

“Software vendors will be able to upgrade their provider information systems when specifications are complete, which is planned for early 2015,” the spokeswoman said.

“Following consultation with the sector, NEHTA has developed draft specifications that will enable provider information systems to send a PDF pathology and diagnostic imaging report to the PCEHR. NEHTA is currently working with software vendors and providers on the software conformance requirements.”

The PCEHR release five also features a new notification in the health record overview (HRO) that shows whether details of a consumer’s advance care directive custodian are available or not. The indigenous status of the consumer is also highlighted.

The DoH spokeswoman said that in addition to this new functionality for consumers, the HRO that clinicians can already see through the provider portal is also now available for inclusion in clinical information systems (CISs).

The HRO provides access to information on a single page, including to shared health summaries, indigenous status, a flag for advance care directive custodian information, key documents such as discharge and event summaries uploaded in the last 12 months, clinical synopsis descriptions from event summaries, and links to several areas within the record, including the prescription and dispense view and pathology and diagnostic imaging views, the spokesperson said.

The Department of Health has also released an invitation to apply for funding to become one of 30 Primary Health Networks (PHNs), which are replacing Medicare Locals from July 1 next year.

The four selection criteria are:

Applications must be submitted by January 27, 2015, with the successful applicants notified “as soon as possible” to allow a minimum transition period of three months before the PHNs become operational.

Applicants can apply for more than one PHN, although most organisations that have announced they are intending to bid are consortia of former Medicare Locals.

The department has outlined indicative funding for each PHN. Most are likely to receive between $3 million and $5 million in operational funding per annum, with flexible funding ranging from $1m to $3m per annum for smaller territories. Factors such as population, rurality and socio-economic status have been taken into account for flexible funding; for example, Western NSW ($10m), Country SA ($12m) and Country WA ($11m).

The total amount of operational and flexible funding that will be provided to PHNs is up to $842 million over three years from 2015-16.

The provision of after-hours GP services is not part of the tender.

In its guidelines, the Department of Health says it will continue to provide national infrastructure to support the PHNs to operate efficiently, including the provision of the National Health Services Directory (NHSD), clinical pathways and primary health maps, eReferral systems and PCEHR integration.

National infrastructure may also include PHN websites with centralised content, a reporting dashboard and in-built capability from the NHSD, video consulting, symptom checkers and clinically governed health information.

Orion Health makes impressive stock exchange debut

Orion Health made an impressive debut on the New Zealand and Australian stock exchanges last week, with shares settling well above the issue price and valuing the company at $NZ1 billion.

Shares of Orion Health began trading on the NZX Main Board and the ASX last Wednesday following an initial public offering (IPO) that raised $NZ120 million in new capital.

The shares were priced at $NZ5.70, at the top of the indicative price range. This morning they had settled in to $6.20 on the NZX and $A5.50 ($NZ6) on the ASX having peaked at $A6.03 on the Australian exchange last week.

Orion Health chairman Andrew Ferrier said the company was now well equipped with the necessary resources to invest further in research and development.

Australia’s Telstra Health was one of an estimated 20 organisations that took up the offer during its book build, investing $NZ20 million in the company.

Telstra has spent over $100 million in the last 18 months investing in or acquiring health IT firms. While there are no firm details on what ventures Telstra and Orion will work on together, Telstra Health managing director Shane Solomon said it would include a number of eHealth initiatives, including medications management.

Telstra recently bought Australia’s leading vendor in the residential and community aged care sector, iCareHealth, which has had a medication management module for a number of years.

“The whole area of medication management, including hospitals, we are deeply interested in,” Mr Solomon said.

“iCareHealth is dominant in the market in the area of medication management within residential aged care, so there is tremendous value if we can build on (community pharmacy leader) Fred IT and integrate with hospital information through Verdi and with Orion, to move towards an integrated medication record.”

Orion Health CEO Ian McCrae said the company was now funded to significantly increase its research and development efforts to expand is capability.

“[I] am very excited that many of these great new roles will be in the New Zealand IT sector,” he said.

Blacktown Hospital goes fully electronic with mobile Paper-Lite

Western Sydney’s Blacktown Hospital has gone live in all clinical units with a fully electronic medical record system for new patients that can be accessed on a range of devices, including iPads, smartphones and computers on wheels (COWs), at the patient’s bedside.

Called Paper-Lite, the fully mobile system allows medical, nursing and allied health clinicians to access patient information from the existing Cerner EMR at the point of care, as well as document assessments and progress notes, create pathology, imaging and dietary electronic orders, and view discharge summaries and consultation notes. The project also involves improvements and new functionality to Cerner.

Clinicians can access the system wirelessly on their own devices or through laptops and COWs. All existing paper medical records and forms that cannot be made electronic are being scanned and incorporated into the system.

Blacktown Hospital’s information technology services (ITS) program manager Bill Rogan said that while Paper-Lite has been built for use with the Cerner application, many of the components have been built internally or by eHealth NSW.

This includes the well-regarded Between the Flags observation chart for nurses, which is integrated into Cerner, as well as an electronic dashboard for all active emergency theatre booking forms or green sheets.

A new patient summary is also included, called mPage, along with new forms for nursing and social work, allied health discharge summaries and clinical documentation for physiotherapy.

The project kicked off 18 months ago with a view to getting all clinical units electronic before the opening of the hospital’s new Clinical Services Building in October next year. The new building is part of the $322 million Blacktown Mount Druitt Hospital (BMDH) redevelopment and is being built with no storage space for traditional paper records.

It went live in the B42 Surgical unit on July 29, with all new patients documented electronically from that day. The other 15 clinical units and departments then followed throughout August, with all up and running by September 2.

It is now set to be rolled out by the Western Sydney Local Health District at Mount Druitt and Auburn hospitals. Blacktown Hospital believes it is the first to go fully electronic in NSW.

Madden, Fleming and Hambleton to headline RMA panel

The Department of Health’s Paul Madden and NEHTA’s Peter Fleming and Steve Hambleton have been confirmed as participants on a special eHealth panel taking place at the Rural Medicine Australia (RMA 2014) conference in Sydney at the end of October.

Mr Madden will outline the main findings from the round of consultations held by DoH in August and September on the recommendations of the Royle review into the PCEHR. Mr Fleming will provide an update on moves to add pathology and diagnostic imaging reports to the PCEHR, and Dr Hambleton will discuss clinical involvement in the system.

The panel session is being held on Friday, October 31 at RMA 2014, the annual joint conference of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) and the Rural Doctors Association of Australia (RDAA).

ACRRM past president Jeff Ayton and RDAA’s Ewen McPhee will also take part in the session. It will be preceded by a demonstration from Dr McPhee on how he uses the PCEHR in rural general practice.

Following the panel session, representatives from state and territory health departments will outline eHealth and telehealth programs and achievements in each state to provide a “whole of health sector” view of eHealth and telehealth progress.

The topic of telehealth and its growing application will also be a major point of discussion at the conference.

Dr Ayton and ACRRM president Richard Murray will lead a telehealth session that will include Shannon Nott, a registrar at Orange Health Service in NSW who was recently awarded a Churchill Fellowship to research the role of telehealth in delivering care to remote indigenous communities.

Professor Murray said ACRRM continued to support the delivery and expansion of telehealth as it allows for much-needed services to be delivered at a local level by rural doctors.

“Mobile devices are increasingly important in the delivery of healthcare in rural areas and these technologies are helping to bridge the rural-city divide,” he said.

“They give rural doctors more scope to share knowledge with colleagues and provide diagnosis from remote locations.

“It’s important for the future of rural medicine and rural communities that as technology advances, so does the interest of rural doctors to ride the telehealth wave.”

The second annual Just A Minute Instant Tutorial (JAMIT) competition is also being held. The competition asks entrants to create short videos on any subject relevant to rural general practice and rural medicine.

RMA 2014 is being held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney from October 30 to November 1. Registrations are now open.

Opinion: $7 co-payment: is there a business case?

The budget proposal to raise a charge of $7 per visit to a GP as well as any associated pathology, X-ray or similar diagnostic tests has sparked a great deal of concern.

The reason for this relates to the question of fairness for less well-off members of our community, including senior citizens, those with disabilities, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and so on.

Quite apart from the obvious financial stress the co-payment may cause for many people – an aspect that has received a great deal of attention – we suggest this proposal also needs to be considered from an economic standpoint.

The government has sold the charge as an important contribution towards its aims of reducing the budget deficit and healthcare costs; the proposal is also said to be aimed at reducing overservicing.

In considering any such pricing issues, it is standard wisdom to consider the business case. In simple terms, this involves comparing the money raised versus the cost of collection.

There no evidence of this having been done, and the business community has been strangely silent on the issue. They will know that the cost of administration to bill and collect a fee of $7 per transaction will be very much more expensive than the present situation, where health funding is raised via the Medicare Levy raised on a standard percentage of taxable income. This levy is a very efficient mechanism.

Paying out Medicare claims is of course more costly, but at least operates on a “one size fits all” type of criteria, and is largely automated now with most patients able to lodge claims electronically from their GPs’ office when they settle their accounts.

But the government’s proposal will involve a further, cumbersome, process to calculate when eligible persons reach the safety net threshold; and this also requires an extensive reframing of existing software by all parties. If the co-pay is due to start on July 1, 2015, and the legislation for its implementation has not yet been passed, then the software development project is already two months behind in an area where work is rarely completed on schedule or within the budgeted cost.

In this regard, we have already heard the Treasurer, Joe Hockey, complaining that the current Department of Human Services computer system is inadequate to handle the government’s future plans.

We also have claims reported in The Australian newspaper, GP co-payment IT system ‘a big ask’, that industry views the current Department of Human Services system as having severe limitations in handling its present client base and the PCEHR (even with its minuscule user base to date) also having regular downtimes.

This report refers to an estimated cost of $14 per transaction to collect each $7 payment from patients on a case-by-case basis, nationwide. Our check with a leading accounting firm confirmed a general cross-industry average of $15 for each of the healthcare providers affected.

We suggest that it is appropriate to now stop and take an independent check on the business case before the proposal proceeds any further, to ensure that there is not a significant increase in the deficit rather than the benefit sought.

It is interesting that the German government introduced a very similar co-payment proposal in 2004, which was scrapped by their parliament in a unanimous vote in 2012. Studies showed that overall, the costs were in excess of revenue collected.

Such experience suggests that the local proposal should be closely examined – free of any conflict of interest, but involving the experience of all interested parties through public submissions.

Meanwhile, the recently released findings of the NBN cost-benefit analysis commissioned by Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, add weight to the need for rigorous assessment of complex programs prior to implementation.

We need to do everything possible to avoid any further misuse of public funds on impractical and unproductive IT projects.

Peter Brown is the convenor of the Consumers e-Health Alliance (CeHA).

RACGP calls for online portal for PBS authority medications

The Department of Health (DoH) is holding public consultations on the authority requirements for prescribing certain PBS medications to gauge opinion on what items should be moved to the streamlined listing or whether prescribing should be unrestricted.

Long a bugbear for many GPs, the authority requirement means doctors must request approval in writing or more commonly by phone to prescribe certain PBS drugs. In addition to taking time during regular consultants with patients, it is seen as a particularly onerous burden for GPs visiting aged care facilities.

According to figures from 2009, of the 6.4 million calls made to the authority phone line, only 2.8 per cent resulted in an authority being denied.

In June, interested parties were asked to make submissions on the terms of reference for a post-market review of authority required PBS listings following the findings of an earlier review into chemotherapy funding arrangements. That review found that authority required listings caused a significant regulatory and administrative burden to prescribing oncologists.

The review into authority requirements is now open to public submissions. The submissions will be collated and presented to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) in time for its November meeting.

The department is recommending that the review be undertaken in three tranches based on the regulatory burden they currently place on prescribers. Those medications that represent that largest number of phone authority requests or the most complex form-filling will be looked at first.

These include drugs for the treatment of many cancers, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and other arthritis medicines. The department is planning to present these drugs to the PBAC in November, followed by a second tranche of drugs for eye conditions, psychiatric conditions and cardiovascular disease in March next year.

All of the other drugs on the list as well as medicines for palliative care will be presented in a third tranche in July 2015.

In its submission, the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) called for the current system to be replaced by an online portal to speed up the process and reduce red tape. The college said the introduction of an online portal to obtain authority approval would substantially reduce red tape and increase efficiency.

“The RACGP recommends that an online portal is considered in place of, or alongside the current phone authority system,” the college wrote in its submission.

It also recommended that telephone authority be removed when the prescriber wants to increase the quantity of medications after initial authority has been obtained for a number of classes of drug, including antidepressants, antipsychotics, anticonvulsants, antibiotics, antihypertensives, anti-reflux medications and antiemetics.

The submission said that a review of the move to the streamlined authority system in 2007 – in which a four-digit number needs to be recorded for medicines for stable long-term conditions with stable dosage requirements – showed no changes to prescribing patterns or rates, meaning GPs were not overprescribing these drugs.

“GPs are responsible prescribers,” the submission states. “The RACGP believes that the authority system is unnecessary as there are already established quality control measures in place to monitor and regulate responsible GP prescribing.

“Recent studies indicate over 90% of Australian general practices use electronic prescribing software, with in-built indicators of any authority listing and associated warnings.

“The National Prescribing Service is another support to GPs in their prescribing practices, aiming to improve the health of Australians through Quality Use of Medicines (QUM). The QUM principles assist GPs to select medication management options wisely; choose suitable medicines; and use medicines safely and effectively.”

It also recommended that all prescription medications commonly used in residential aged care facilities, including S8 drugs, be put on the streamlined list as a means to reducing the red tape and high cost and administrative burden on GPs, which the college says discourages many GPs from providing services to RACFs.

In its submission, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) said only about 70 per cent of calls to the phone line were answered within two minutes. It wants the full cost of the authority requirement to be assessed, and that if medicines still require an authority, the process be properly resourced.

The Pharmacy Guild said PBS items should not need an authority unless there were sound clinical or economic reasons for it. It also wants to do away with the necessity for streamlined items to be written on a special form when a regular form could be used and the streamlined code included next to the prescription.

This would necessitate a simple change to prescribing and dispensing software, the Guild said.

Submissions to the review will be accepted until Wednesday, October 8 and can be lodged by email with the PBS Post Market Review team.

ACRRM and HISA join forces to promote telehealth

The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine (ACRRM) and the Health Informatics Society of Australia (HISA) have agreed to jointly produce webinars promoting the use of telehealth as a tool to overcome the fragmentation of care.

The overall aim is to increase the availability of quality telehealth services to people living in rural and remote Australia.

The series will focus on topics such as the management of chronic and complex conditions, developing care pathways that include telehealth, federal and state government policy initiatives such as NSW’s integrated care policy and the Queensland rural telehealth plan, and potentially bring your own devices, in which consumers are providing their own hardware and monitoring peripherals.

Three webinars have been planned so far, to take place before the Rural Medicine Australia conference in Sydney in October and one before HISA’s Australian Telehealth Conference (ATC) next year.

ACRRM has agreed to provide the webinar platform and host the presentation on its eHealth website and YouTube channel, while HISA will be in charge of recruiting and supporting presenters.

ACRRM hosted a webinar in June featuring GP and telehealth advocate Ewen McPhee, of the Emerald Medical Group in central Queensland.

That webinar, which explained how to set up and successfully run a sustainable telehealth service in rural general practice, is available on ACRRM’s YouTube channel, as is a video subsequently filmed in the practice.

In the video, Dr McPhee says there are obvious benefits in a practical sense of delivering care locally and receiving specialist advice in the patient’s own environment. He describes how telehealth can provide experiences that face to face consultations can’t, including the case of a rural family who were all able to attend a consultation in Dr McPhee’s surgery and were able to ask the remote specialist questions.

“You would never see that in a specialist consultation, that the whole family would travel to come and see the specialist,” he says. “That is one of the key things with telehealth: it is able to turn things on its head as far as a specialist consultation – the travel, the time away from home and also involving the extended family.”

Practice nurse Carmel Johnson explains the practical elements of setting up a consultation, while practice manager Wendy McPhee describes the growth in the service, with the practice now running two ADSL2+ connections and 4G back-up to handle demand.

Two of the practice’s rural generalist registrars, Mitch Christensen and Rebecca Jorgensen, also discuss their experiences, as does a paediatrician in Rockhampton who often takes part.

The importance of getting more specialists involved is highlighted, with Dr McPhee saying many specialists are interested, “although there is still a misunderstanding of the appropriateness of telehealth or its ability to provide the fidelity of face-to-face consultations”.

An ACRRM spokesperson said the college is working with the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) to encourage specialists visiting rural and remote areas to incorporate telehealth services as an adjunct to face-to-face services.

RCPA invites comment on pathology information standardisation

The Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) is set to release for public comment a draft document outlining updated standards, guidelines, terminology reference sets and preferred units of measure as part of its Pathology Information, Terminology and Units Standardisation (PITUS) project.

Public comment will also be invited on the rendering of pathology reports in general practice clinical information systems following a survey of clinicians on how they wanted to view pathology results.

The PITUS project follows the completion of the RCPA’s Pathology Units and Terminology Standardisation (PUTS) project, which last year developed standardised reference sets of terminology for pathology requesting and reporting and preferred units of measurement for results.

It includes a list of standardised orderable test codes that cover over 95 per cent of the tests ordered by GPs.

The PITUS project is a continuation of this work and concentrates on the implementation of the standards and reference sets in pathology and general practice information systems. Another focus is to ensure all critical information in a report is transmitted safely.

The chair of the RCPA’s steering committee for the project, Michael Legg, said it was the result of around 12 months’ work from dedicated working groups of pathologists, general practitioners, other clinicians, scientists and informaticians and a wider involvement of many who contributed directly to specific elements of the work including pathology practices, general practices and medical software companies.

Associate Professor Legg said the work on the rendering of pathology reports is also being used to inform the current discussions on how to upload pathology reports to the PCEHR. The Department of Health is currently holding a series of meetings on the topic, as well as on how to upload diagnostic imaging reports. Further meetings are scheduled for next month.

Those discussion have led to a general consensus that pathology reports should be uploaded as an immutable PDF in advance of longer term work on how to upload atomic data.

Uploading the full report as a PDF is seen as the safest way to ensure that pathology results cannot be misinterpreted, A/Prof Legg said.

“Nobody knows how [atomic data] is going to be rendered at this point, so until we’re comfortable that it’s working properly, the safest way of doing it is to make sure that’s it is shown in a way that the reporting laboratory would expect it to be,” he said.

On the PITUS project’s draft recommendations, Dr Legg said the steering committee had agreed that it was ready to be sent out for public comment, after which modifications will be made where appropriate and it will then become RCPA policy. He said the project had gone very smoothly.

“The steering committee which included RACGP, MSIA, NEHTA and the Department of Health have worked really well together,” he said. “We’ve had around 70 people working for a year and we’ve had really good contributions from general practice. With them, the number gets to more than 500 people involved in this phase of the PITUS program.”

While the RCPA awaits the results of the public comment, the project’s working groups are concentrating on how to oversee its implementation. Working group one is working on monitoring the implementation of the standardisation of requesting and reporting in conjunction with the Medical Software Industry Association (MSIA) and the Australian Health Care Messaging Laboratory (AHML).

Working group two has mapped the RCPA’s quality assurance program test list to SNOMED-CT-AU codes; working group three has developed draft recommendations and guidelines for the rendering of reports including cumulative ones; while working group four has developed guidelines for the representation and rendering of reference values and age ranges provided for guidance on reports.

Working group five has worked on standardising reporting to clinical registries such as cancer and communicable diseases registries.

The RCPA hopes to have the draft available on its website shortly. To receive an alert when the draft is ready, email the PITUS project officer, Donna Moore.

The RCPA is also holding a two-day pathology informatics seminar in Sydney in mid-November. Topics include health informatics; information architecture; software engineering, development and evaluation; molecular and genomic information principles; imaging systems; automation in clinical laboratories; decision support in pathology; lab IT infrastructure and laboratory information systems (LIS).

Speakers include A/Prof Legg, Bond University’s Tony Badrick, Sonic Healthcare’s Lawrie Bott, Peter Joseph and Ken Sikaris, consultant clinical pathologist Leslie Burnett, St John of God Pathology’s Glenn Edwards, consultant surgical pathologist David Ellis, Andrew Georgiou of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, Westmead Hospital microbiologist Vitali Sintchenko and Healthscope CIO Paul Williams.

The RCPA Pathology Informatics Seminar is being held on Wednesday, November 12 and Thursday, November 13 at the Alan Ng Education Centre at the RCPA’s head office in Surry Hills, Sydney.

Registrations are open online.

Technology as a tool to keep people at home

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

RDNS has nearly 130 years’ experience in the provision of home healthcare, and its growing range of services reflect the challenges of an ageing population and increased rates of chronic disease. RDNS has taken a leadership role in using technology for the past 20 years to improve access to care in the home as part of this changing aged care environment.

Investment in information technology at RDNS is playing a vital part in support of quality healthcare for our clients in their homes, as well as an improved care management experience for families and clients. Technologically, RDNS has always sought to be a leader and take advantage of emerging technologies. Our telehealth activities are linked via the central hub of our Customer Service Centre and our services now comprise the provision of home care across Australia, thus responding to the needs of people who are increasingly wishing to remain in their own homes to receive services.

RDNS sees telehealth and telecare as a key aspect of our response to the increasing demand for quality, cost-effective services. RDNS is essentially developing a technological ecosystem through which required support can be brought to a client in the quickest and most effective manner, without compromising clinical quality or a sense of personal connection.

Different situations demand different modes of care and with telehealth, this may not always mean home visits only. It may be more appropriate to connect a RDNS nurse with a client through web-based video conferencing, providing the client greater flexibility whilst giving us the ability to provide more care to more people with decreased travel time.

This sort of technology also allows the connection of peripheral devices to remotely monitor various indicators of a client’s health such as heart rate, temperature, glucose levels and body weight, and record these measurements against a client’s care record.

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