International health IT week in review: November 29

Pulse+IT’s weekly weekend round-up of international health IT and eHealth news:

Questions asked about £1bn NHS IT fund
Digital Health News ~ Thomas Meek ~ 26/11/2015

The government’s plan to invest £1 billion in new technology for the NHS in England over the next five years has received a cautious welcome from trade body Tech UK.


Ransomware attacks on med devices a real possibility in 2016
FierceHealthIT ~ Susan D Hall ~ 25/11/2015

Ransomware will come to medical devices or wearables in 2016, Forrester Research predicts in a new report.


Mobile technology – a new infection risk?
eHealthNews.eu ~ Mike Casey ~ 25/11/2015

Before the advent of modern medicine, a stay in hospital was a risky business – in a crowded, dirty ward, an infection could spread like wildfire.


Should the DoD be entitled to its own definition of interoperability?
FierceEMR ~ Marla Durben Hirsch ~ 24/11/2015

I think we’ve stumbled upon one the biggest barriers to interoperability between the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA): there’s no real consensus on what ‘interoperability’ is.


Challenges ahead for portals
Health Data Management ~ Greg Slabodkin ~ 24/11/2015

With the rush to implement electronic health record systems and meet meaningful use requirements, there have been mixed results in getting patients to use patient portals.


Your doctor doesn’t want to hear about your fitness-tracker data
MIT Technology Review ~ Andrew Rosenblum ~ 24/11/2015

You may think your smart watch or activity tracker can help you keep tabs on your health, but don’t be shocked if your doctor is more skeptical.


Deborah Estrin’s ResearchKit for Android project taps Mole Mapper as first app
MobiHealthNews ~ Jonah Comstock ~ 24/11/2015

ResearchKit is finally coming to Android. Or at least, ResearchStack, a comparable and compatible research framework for Android devices is coming to Android.


USDA increases rural telehealth funding
HealthcareITNews ~ Jessica Davis ~ 24/11/2015

U.S. Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, announced the expansion of the USDA Rural Development’s Distance Learning and Telemedicine Program with $23.4 million in additional funding for 75 new projects in 31 states.


Patient opt-outs actioned by January
Digital Health News ~ Rebecca McBeth ~ 24/11/2015

Around 700,000 patients who objected to having their identifiable data shared with third parties will have their wishes recognised by January next year, nearly two years after being offered the opt-out.


Epocrates pulls plug on Bugs + Drugs
HealthcareITNews ~ Jonah Comstock ~ 24/11/2015

Epocrates, an athenahealth subsidiary, pulled its Bugs + Drugs app from the App Store this past week, two years after the free mobile tool was found by physician reviewers at the iMedicalApps review site to be rife with errors.


NHS boost includes £1 billion for IT
Digital Health News ~ Lyn Whitfield ~ 24/11/2015

The government is to “fully fund” the NHS ‘Five Year Forward View” over the course of this Parliament; and Treasury documents indicate that £1 billion will go on NHS IT over the next five years.


Will 2016 be when consumer-driven healthcare kicks in?
mHealth News ~ Tom Sullivan ~ 23/11/2015

Over the next five years technology has the “ability to change the marketplace,” with three major trends: convergent technology redefining what’s possible in healthcare, the invasion of consumer technology and the big question of whether the consumer will use it. No one wins unless the consumer wins.


App combines symptom checker, health info and service finder

Healthdirect Australia has launched a new app for iOS and Android devices that combines the health service finder functionality of the National Health Services Directory (NHSD) with a clinically validated symptom checker and trusted health information sourced from Australia’s leading health organisations.

The healthdirect app uses GPS to help users locate their nearest general practice, pharmacist or hospital and also displays latitude and longitude coordinates that can be relayed to triple zero in case of emergency. It also shows users the address of the nearest emergency department.

Using Google Maps, the app will pinpoint the selected type of health service and display a pop-up containing the name, address, phone number, distance and whether it is open or shut. Users can also browse in list view and see whether a clinic bulk bills, for example.

The symptom checker lists an extensive array of potential conditions but also common ones such as fever, abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting or chest and back pain. It runs users through an assessment of symptoms and can make a recommendation on self-care or whether to consult a GP or call emergency services immediately.

Healthdirect Australia general manager for digital services Anton Donker said the new app was unique for its combination of a national directory of health services, a symptom checker and searchable health information that has been tailored for local conditions and terminology.

Professor Donker said the symptom checker technology had first been developed by the UK National Health Service, which has based it on years of experience with telephone advice lines as well as clinically validated information provided by medical professionals.

“In world terms, I’m not aware of anywhere in the world that brings together that sort of combination,” he said. “A national directory of any quality is rare in itself. The symptom checker we did in conjunction with the NHS with Australian clinical content and standards, and added bites and stings. It is world-class as a symptom checker.”

Figures from Hitwise show that there are more than 12 million online health searches a week in Australia, but of those, about 78 per cent go straight to offshore sites.

Healthdirect’s health information search function provides numerous links to validated online health information provided by Australian organisations such as the Asthma Foundation, the state cancer councils and the state and territory governments. There are also links to quality third-party sources providing Australian information.

While Healthdirect has had these capabilities on its website for a couple of years, it has now been optimised for mobile devices through the app, Professor Donker said.

“Our stats are showing that more than two-thirds of health inquiries are now coming from mobile devices,” he said. “We have had a ‘do mobile first’ for quite a while now and that is really fundamental across the internet landscape.

“Our decision to invest in a mobile app was made easy by the increasing number of Australians moving to mobile as their preferred communication platform. It’s a natural evolution to our Healthdirect service, as our core role is to help people manage their own health through use of innovative technology. It is the combination of these three things in one app that people have really been after.”

He said while he thought the front end of the app was pretty good – it will be refined as feedback comes in – it is the power in the back end that is the difference.

“In the back end there is a directory, a seriously good decision support system with lots of clinical decision support, and information that is well tested and designed and audited.”

Professor Donker said the app would be marketed by its state and territory health department shareholders but mainly through word of mouth from clinicians.

Healthdirect is also working to ensure that any errors in the NHSD can be fixed quickly. Professor Donker said the directory currently contains about 350,000 entries and the Healthdirect team was changing about 1500 entries a day as clinicians move between jobs and locations.

Any authorised person can amend their details online but Healthdirect also conducts checks through professional organisations, Primary Health Networks, state health departments and the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA).

“Each individual clinic or authorised person – it’s usually the practice manager – they can [make corrections] online, but we know that doesn’t work that well for many providers,” he said.

“It works well for pharmacists who use it because it gets people in the door, but specialists for example, they’ve got a full book and people queued up outside their door, and they don’t need more so often they don’t care if their details are that accurate or not.

“So we work with the PHNs … if the practice has said yes, my PHN can maintain information on my behalf, that’s another check. We work with the professional organisations and we check with AHPRA for credentialing. We check with the HI Service and we check with Medicare. And then there are consumers. You can see a pharmacy was there yesterday and it has gone today or something is not quite right.

“Literally every screen on the directory has a ‘log a change’ button. The in-house team then goes and checks with the owner of the record. With healthcare providers, [details] change regularly and we are working to automate that with clinical systems so that is reflected in the NHSD. It will get a lot better over the years.”

The healthdirect app is available on the App Store and Google Play.

Alcidion targets eHealth guidance system at real-time bed management

Adelaide-based health information system vendor Alcidion has officially launched Miya Bed Manager, based on the intelligent patient journey and bed management system it has implemented at Western Health.

Described by Alcidion’s vice president for clinical engagement Leanne Dillon as an “eHealth guidance system”, Miya Bed Manager promises to increase transparency about patient flow, bed capacity and demand.

Ms Dillon, a former nurse who helped develop and implement the system at Western Health before joining Alcidion, told a webinar today that the lack of an effective electronic bed management system at Western Health had been identified as a barrier in the appropriate management of patient access.

“The key benefit is the transparency of information across the system: real-time data is available wherever the staff member is on a mobile device, meaning everyone from the nurse unit manager through to the bed manager and even the responsible executive is working from the same data,” Ms Dillon said.

Western Health, which has hospitals at Sunshine, Footscray and Williamstown, uses a range of hardware devices for its bed management system, known as Access Glance, including iPads for use in multidisciplinary meetings and ward rounds along with large-format journey boards.

It is aimed at managing the complete bed stock and can take real-time information from a hospital’s patient administration, emergency department and scheduling systems, allowing bed managers to see potential admissions from ED as well as elective and direct admissions.

It also shows potential and confirmed discharges, length of stay and provides at-a-glance information on why a patient scheduled for discharge may still be assigned to a bed, such as a wait for an x-ray before they are able to go home.

Like other products in the Miya suite, the software also includes intelligent processing of clinical risk and is able to match availability to a patient’s needs and dependency.

Miya Bed Manager promises to provide a real-time view of bed status, providing management and operational staff visibility and quantifiable data on the hospital capacity and availability, both internally within the hospital or across an entire health service.

Live admission, transfer and discharge transactions can be managed, offering accurate reporting as well as providing a solid base on to which other location based systems can be built, such as order communications and electronic prescribing, or even meal ordering.

Infection control teams can manage patient isolation as well as ‘at risk’ patients by identifying which patients require single rooms.

Alcidion plans to list on the stock exchange later this year through a reverse takeover.

Getz Clinical adds PreOp module to cloud system for anaesthesia

Clinical software vendor Getz Clinical has added the latest version of its PreOp module to its cloud-based anaesthesia information management system.

PreOp is a web-based application that integrates with other Getz Clinical Cloud modules as well as with a hospital’s patient administration system. Completed PreOp questionnaires are immediately accessible to clinicians anywhere in a hospital network, including during surgical procedures.

Patient self-assessment questionnaires and clinical assessment questionnaires document a patient’s anaesthetic, surgical and medication history, allergies and alerts, examination data and surgery risk assessment criteria, compiled in an electronic report.

Getz Clinical’s other modules include IntraOp, used in operating theatres, and PACU, used in recovery bays, both of which record patient data sourced directly from patient monitoring equipment and through data keyed in by clinicians on medical-grade touch screen devices.

Clients include Royal Adelaide Hospital, which has used Getz Clinical modules as its enterprise perioperative management system since 2003; short-stay private hospital Forté Health, which opened in Christchurch in 2014; the 1600-bed, 41-theatre Singapore General Hospital, which implemented Getz Clinical’s IntraOp, PACU, Analytics, Chronology and Admin modules in 2013; and the massive Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, Johannesburg.

The company offers its software and hardware as a service with a ‘no-risk’ implementation program with no upfront implementation or integration costs. It is a Microsoft shop and uses Amazon Web Services as its cloud provider.

Getz Clinical’s Hong Kong-based CEO, James Rennie, said the company’s software improves the accuracy, security and accessibility of patient data.

“To combat rising healthcare costs there is a need for greater operational efficiencies in hospitals,” Mr Rennie said in a statement. “PreOp and other modules in the Getz Clinical Cloud suite provide real-time metrics that enable anaesthetists to make prudent decisions, thus improving patient care while simultaneously reducing the pressure on hospital staff.”

The company says its customers include more than 50 hospitals and medical centres across Asia, Europe, Africa and Australasia. It is part of the Getz Group, which also markets medical devices and equipment and pharmaceuticals.

RACGP launches benzos guide, calls for real-time monitoring

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has repeated its calls for the immediate roll-out of a real-time prescription monitoring system as it launches a new guide on prescribing benzodiazepines.

The guide focuses on patient-centred care, accountable prescribing and harm reduction for the drug class, of which seven million prescriptions are written each year.

RACGP president Frank Jones said although benzodiazepines had been associated with both benefits and harms for patients, their use had led to growing concern about the harms associated with both authorised and unauthorised use.

“As GPs we need to be vigilant in identifying patients who may be misusing or abusing benzodiazepines because this can become a long-term and distressing problem,” Dr Jones said in a statement.

“Patients who have a substance use disorder may ‘doctor shop’ to gain prescriptions and increase their use and dosage. When taken in combination with other substances such as opioid medications, illicit drugs and alcohol, this can result in death.”

The release of the guide coincides with a recommendation from a Queensland coroner on Monday that real-time monitoring systems be introduced following an inquiry into the death of a Toowoomba nurse from an overdose of the opioid painkiller fentanyl.

Combinations of opioids with Schedule 4 drugs like benzodiazepines have been cited in a number of cases over the last decade of accidental overdose, leading to repeated calls for systems to be introduced to reduce doctor shopping.

Dr Jones said the guide should help reduce patient harm associated with benzodiazepine misuse but broader issues beyond the control of the RACGP also need to be addressed.

“There needs to be an immediate rollout of a real-time prescription drug database, something the RACGP has long called for,” he said.

“There is also the need for consistency across states when it comes to laws and definitions regarding drugs of dependence because current variations complicate and confuse health professionals.”

While the RACGP, the Pharmacy Guild and the AMA all support the introduction of a national system that can be used by both doctors and pharmacists such as the Electronic Recording and Reporting of Controlled Drugs (ERRCD) system, there are some immediate options that doctors and pharmacists can take:

GPs who use the MediSecure electronic prescription exchange will soon be able to use its Dr Shop functionality. This will allow doctors to check in real time if a patient has been prescribed Schedule 8 or Schedule 4 drugs in the previous 90 days.

GPs and approved pharmacists can also register for Medicare’s prescription shopping program, which includes a 24-hour Prescription Shopping Information Service (PSIS) and a Prescription Shopping Alert Service.

GPs are provided with a statement as to whether their patient meets the criteria of a prescription shopper, with patient summary reports available on those who do. A prescription shopper is defined as anyone who, within a three-month period, has been supplied with PBS items prescribed by six or more different prescribers or a total of 25 or more target PBS items.

Several states run their own programs, such as Queensland’s Monitoring of Drugs of Dependence System (MODDS), although like ERRCD these are often restricted to Schedule 8 drugs and do not include Schedule 4 drugs like benzodiazepines.

The national roll-out of ERRCD, based on Tasmania’s DORA system, was first mooted back in 2012, but as Pulse+IT reported in March last year, there are a number of hurdles the states and territories must overcome before the system can be used.

NSW seems to be the furthest along the road to implementing ERRCD in the big states, but it is Victoria which has been the most vocal about its introduction, with the AMA repeatedly stressing its urgency.

PCEHR opt-out trials set to start next April

An implementation taskforce that will organise the transition of responsibilities for eHealth and the PCEHR to a new federal agency is expected to be established next month, with trials of an opt-out model for the PCEHR due to begin next April.

A spokesperson for the federal Department of Health (DoH) said that the arrangements for the implementation taskforce, which was recommended by the 2013 Royle review of the PCEHR, are currently being finalised and are now expected to be established in August.

The taskforce will oversee the transition of responsibilities for the operational activities of the PCEHR from DoH and broader eHealth system operations now managed by the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) to a new federal agency expected to be called the Australian Commission for eHealth (ACeH).

ACeH will be established as a new corporate Commonwealth entity through the Public Governance, Public Accountability (PGPA) Act. DoH special adviser for strategic health systems and information, Paul Madden, recently told Pulse+IT that the department expects the operational regulations for the agency to be ready in late December, with the process of filling roles on the board, the various committees and key positions in the organisation occurring sometime in early 2016.

It is due to come into full operation in July 2016, when NEHTA will be officially abolished.

Trials of opt-out participation arrangements for the PCEHR, which was also recommended by the Royle review and is favoured by the government, are expected to start in April 2016, the DoH spokesperson said.

These sites are expected to cover large geographical areas and may include specific cohorts of people, with the department aiming to have over a million people involved.

The spokesperson said the states and territories have been asked to nominate potential sites for these trials for consideration by the Minister for Health.

“Trial sites are expected to be agreed by the Minister and relevant jurisdiction Health Ministers in September 2015,” the spokesperson said.

Communicare rolls out across indigenous communities in Qld

Queensland’s Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service will roll out Telstra Health’s Communicare community health and practice management software package across seven sites in Yarrabah near Cairns, adding to the 187 sites it is live in across the country.

The contract follows an agreement signed in March with the North West Hospital and Health Service to roll Communicare out to 23 communities over an area of 300,000 square kilometres.

Gurriny Yealamucka Health Service supports the Yarrabah community, one of the largest indigenous communities in Australia. Communicare has been designed with a focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health.

It allows clinical information to be accessed in multiple locations and by a range of health providers across primary healthcare including general practice, maternal health, immunisations, drug and alcohol management and paediatric care.

WA-headquartered Communicare is part of the HealthConnex group (formerly DCA Health) following its acquisition in 2012. HealthConnex was subsequently bought by Telstra Health in August 2013 as one of Telstra’s first ventures as it began building its eHealth business.

Telstra Health’s managing director Shane Solomon said Communicare showed how integrated, digital healthcare solutions could change health outcomes for all Australians.

“We set up Telstra Health to connect all Australians to the healthcare they need, when they need it,” Mr Solomon said in a statement. “This is a great example of how even the most remote Australians can still get the care they deserve.

“The importance of closing the gap cannot be overstated – not only do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have a shorter lifespan than other Australians, but they also have higher rates of chronic illness such as diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease.

“Communicare allows health services to have integrated patient records and care plans as well as a tailored appointment management service that addresses unique challenges remote indigenous communities and patients face. The delivery of care is very different to visiting a GP clinic in a capital city and this makes it easier for doctors, patients and providers.”

Gurinny Yealamucka Health Service CEO Suzanne Andrews said Communicare was selected because of its focus on comprehensive primary healthcare.

“Communicare will help achieve better health outcomes for our people as well as empower all our health professionals to easily review performance on health outcomes for our patients,” she said.

Communicare general manager Greg Robinson said the company was delighted the health service had selected Communicare.

“They become almost our 200th site across the country and we look forward to them implementing the application to support holistic primary care to the community.”

Is it safe? Great debate on health IT safety and regulation

The International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) is inviting comments and votes on an online debate on whether health IT is improving the safety of healthcare.

Introduced by David Bates, chief innovation officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and featuring Australian surgeon Guy Maddern speaking for the negative, the debate also queries whether further regulation of the industry would inhibit innovation and make safety worse.

“We have a lot of evidence that health information technology (HIT) does improve safety, at least in selected institutions, but now the HIT that is being implemented is largely vendor developed and it is being implemented much more broadly,” Dr Bates said.

“There have been many reports of new problems that have been created by health information technology.”

Dr Bates said there had also been a substantial amount of discussion about the amount of regulation required, which led to the topic of the debate: HIT is already improving healthcare safety and current regulation around it is sufficient.

Speaking for the proposition were Aziz Sheikh from the Centre for Medical Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, a former GP who is now one of the world’s leading evaluators of health IT; and Dean Sittig from the University of Texas School of Biomedical Informatics, who has a specific research interest in the design, development, implementation and evaluation of clinical information systems.

Speaking against was Professor Maddern, who in addition to his roles as a practising surgeon at The Queen Elizabeth Hospital and as professor of surgery at the University of Adelaide, is also the surgical director of the Australian Safety and Efficacy Register of New Interventional Procedures – Surgical for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons.

He was joined by Ross Koppel, a professor of sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Wharton School’s Leonard Davis Institute for Healthcare Economics.

Professor Sheikh argued that the evidence base points to the fact that HIT can affect safety but in reality, there “isn’t an epidemic of harm associated with HIT”. He also argued that regulation can be well-intended but it can also have unintended consequences, including the stifling of innovation.

“I have for a number of years been summarising the international evidence on HIT and its impact on the quality and safety of care, and I’ll be the first to admit that whilst there is enormous potential, quite often this is not being realised,” Professor Sheikh said.

“The challenges are largely in relation to limited functionality, it quite often doesn’t meet the needs of front-line physicians, there are challenges with usability, there are socio-technical issues about how this can interface with workforce deliberations on clinical workflows.

“This can sometimes lead to professional frustration and lead to poor patient experiences and there are certainly some cases where patients come to harm, but if I reflect from general practice in the UK for example, where we have been digital for the last at least 15 years … there is no large-scale evidence of any epidemic of HIT-associated, iatrogenic harm.”

He argued that there was already a raft of legislative and regulatory approaches in the UK, the EU and the US, all of which are designed to enhance the safety of HIT devices or software, and that regulation quite often has unintended consequences such as stifling innovation.

“If innovation is stifled, if the regulatory bar is so high that new entrants can’t enter into the marketplace, what this will do is it will really stifle competition,” he said. “What we actually need at this point in time is that we need new entrants, we need more dynamism in the vendor marketplace, what we need is competition because what this will do is it will force innovations in new directions.”

Professor Koppel countered by saying that while HIT continues to hold immense promise for reducing medical errors and collecting instant and vast data, clinicians find this technology frustrating and falling short of its promised benefits.

Professor Sittig argued for the proposition, saying the fact that HIT is already improving patient safety should be abundantly clear to anyone who can even remotely remember what healthcare was like in the pre-computer age.

With the recent advances in technology, our newly acquired capability to measure and monitor various aspects of medical care has already had a significant positive impact on the safety of healthcare and this will only increase as we learn more about how to collect and interpret these large databases, he said.

He also argued that current regulation is sufficient and that there is a risk to patient safety due to our limited understanding of any unintended consequences that might arise due to inappropriate additional legislation.

Speaking last, Professor Maddern said that as a clinician, he constantly has to wrestle with the realities of dealing with IT systems.

“At present, many hospital systems, certainly outside of North America, are still using paper-based systems,” he said. “One has to ask oneself why this is the case, given that we are all very used to having smartphones, computers in our offices and navigation systems in our cars.

“Why is it that the health sector has been so slow to embrace the electronic health record and the promise that it brings?”

He argued that despite companies spending billions of dollars trying to develop electronic health records and IT systems, they have largely been developed by “computer geniuses” without much reference to the doctors, nurses and allied health professionals who are going to have to use the technology.

“For this reason, the capabilities of many of the systems is extraordinary but the usability is anything but remarkable,” he said.

He used the example of Australia’s PCEHR, which while it may have millions of people enrolled it only contains records numbering in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands or millions.

He argued that there was tremendous support given to GPs to use the PCEHR but nothing to specialists or the hospital sector.

“In a country like Australia where particularly as people get older, they travel quite large distances, the ability to have a portable record is obvious,” he said. “The reality however is that this is largely unused and I would have to say in my own hospital, I would not have any idea how we would access it despite the fact that I know it’s available.”

He argued that digitising and storing health records was an obvious enticement to hackers, and that the use of electronic health records in practice could and does interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.

He also argued that many hospital-based EHRs were built for accounting rather than care delivery reasons, and regulation was absolutely essential if we are going to be able to maintain sensible control of the data generated.

“No doubt the next decade will see these technologies become widespread but at the moment they are at best primitive, unhelpful and poorly developed.”

Leecare to launch P5 Finance module with CDC capabilities

Aged care software vendor Leecare Solutions is getting ready to launch a new version of its P5 Finance product that includes capabilities to handle consumer-directed care (CDC) reporting changes due to begin shortly.

Leecare has been trialling the software for over a year with aged care providers as an enterprise-based financial system. It can be paired with Leecare’s clinical system, Platinum 5.0, for an integrated solution but the company also offers its modules, including medications management and P5 Exec, its operational management module, as standalone systems.

Leecare Solutions CEO Caroline Lee said P5 Finance is being rolled out across 67 facilities in Victoria as well as in a health fund’s five aged care facilities.

It is also set to go live in Singapore, where it is being used along with the rest of the Leecare suite as part of the $S6.5 million Nursing Home IT Enablement Program (NHELP).

P5 Finance, P5 Med medications management and P5 Exec are all due to be turned on this week, following the go live of Platinum 5.0 clinical in March.

Leecare’s cloud-based software was chosen last year by Singapore’s Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) as the basis of NHELP, which allows aged care facilities to subscribe to the software as a service.

NHELP is also linked to Singapore’s National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) and the AIC’s integrated referral management system.

Nine aged care facilities committed to participating in the project when it was first launched last year, with the AIC hoping it would be implemented in 36 by 2017.

The AIC and Leecare are partnering with systems integrator T-Systems Singapore, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, on the roll-out, which will also include a payroll solution from Singapore firm AGHRM and a rostering solution from Australian company TimeTarget.

Leecare hosted a delegation from Singapore last year to show how P5 Med, Platinum 5.0 clinical and P5 Exec work in practice for three large Australian aged care providers. Dr Lee said the delegation included four senior personnel from the AIC as well as representatives from three Singapore nursing homes.

“They wanted to get real, on the floor advice about change management strategies, planning for a roll-out, how to overcome staff disinterest initially and ensure leadership prevails,” Dr Lee said.

It included a visit to RSL Lifecare’s seven nursing homes and retirement villages, including a tour of the new Peter Cosgrove House in Narrabeen in NSW. There was also a trip to Harbison Care’s two digitally enhanced sites in Bowral in country NSW, where each resident has an iPad.

The delegation also visited three Barwon Health nursing homes to discuss how Platinum 5.0 has been deployed across the South West Rural Health network over the past seven years, a project which won the national IT in Aged Care (ITAC) awards in 2009.

PeriCoach device, four-hour rule dashboard win Qld iAwards

The Queensland-developed PeriCoach device that assists women doing pelvic floor muscle training for stress urinary incontinence has taken out the health category at the Queensland iAwards.

PeriCoach includes a personalised device using biofeedback sensors, an app that provides instructions and pre-programmed exercises, and a web portal where women can monitor their progress and share it with their GP or other chosen healthcare provider.

Clinicians can also send notes and develop custom protocols that can be directly sent to the app.

The device is available in Australia and New Zealand for $A298, and is also being distributed by prescription in the US, where it recently received FDA approval.

PeriCoach has been developed by ASX-listed Analytica, which is chaired by medical practitioner Michael Monsour, also principal of Godbar Software, which markets The Practice clinical and practice management software.

Metro South Hospital and Health Service won a merit award in the health category for its CLEAR emergency department inpatient dashboard, which monitors patient outcomes correlating to the National Emergency Access Target (NEAT), better known as the four-hour rule.

The dashboard was developed internally by a team led by Princess Alexandra Hospital (PAH) deputy director of medicine Clair Sullivan. The technology has been implemented in nine hospitals.

Before the development of CLEAR, PAH had the worst NEAT performance in Australia but has halved the mortality rate of patients requiring emergency admission.

Also winning a merit award was the CSIRO for its cloud-based image analysis and processing toolbox, which provides improved access to biomedical image processing and analysis software packages via web-based user interfaces.