Centralised patient data to equip hospitals when making critical decisions

Digital & Innovation: A $2.1 million project to collect patient data in one place aims to better equip healthcare workers when making critical and life-saving clinical decisions.

The Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) project will deliver live streams of clinical analytics and reporting information in the form of online dashboards. The dashboards will drive quality improvement, safety assurance and more efficient accreditation in a hospital setting. The data will be drawn from hospital electronic medical records (EMR) and the Victorian Health Incident Management System (VHIMS).

Prof David Plunkett, Chief Executive of Eastern Health, said the project is the first of its kind in Victoria, with exciting potential for scalability.  

“This project is led by our Executive Director of Information, Technology and Capital Projects, Zoltan Kokai. It will display streamed data on dashboards extracted from Eastern Health hospital systems,” Professor Plunkett said.

“Importantly, it will bring together the areas of clinical practice, technology and the very important requirement of accreditation, to proactively improve the quality and safety of how care is provided.”

A Monash University spokesperson told Health Industry Hub “The dashboards developed for the project will make use of deidentified, aggregated data. It will be the same data that is used for healthcare standards audit purposes. Individual patient consent is not required for this accreditation use.”

Prof Peteris Darzins, Exec Clinical Director of Aged Medicine and Director of Geriatric Medicine at Eastern Health, added “This is an exciting venture for clinicians and will facilitate and improve patient care in a timely manner.”

Neville Board, Victoria’s Chief Digital Health Officer said the project builds on investments in digitisation of health care in Victorian hospitals. EMR and other clinical data sources will be used to ensure health services can be ready at any time for accreditation. At the same time, clinical datasets will be put into the hands of clinicians to drive local quality improvement.

“It’s essential we shift from manually collating clinical data. Digital technologies will empower our hospitals to provide real time data for clinical decision making and for accreditation against national standards set by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care,” Mr Board said.

Chris Bain, Professor of Practice in Digital Health at Monash University, says the project uses innovative technologies to address a pressing need in the healthcare sector for reliable, quick and easy-to-access data.

“The dashboards will combine data engineering techniques with user-friendly visualisations to surface key information from large data-sets,” said Professor Bain.

“These dashboards will enable clinicians to better understand the quality of care needed on a continuous daily basis, leading to improved quality standards, better patient care and overall support for clinicians.”

Accreditation of safety and quality in health services aims to ensure the health system is better informed, supported and organised to deliver safe and high-quality care.

“We plan to evaluate the value and efficacy of the dashboards in 1) preparing for accreditation, and 2) in continuous quality improvement outside of the accreditation time,” said the Monash University spokesperson to Health Industry Hub.

“The dashboards will be trialled at Eastern Health and the intention is to prepare the first of these dashboards to target one of the NSQHS Standards and evaluate its use for use in the accreditation that will happen in early 2022, then monitor its ongoing use. We will then apply knowledge from this in designing and implementing further dashboards for remaining standards and evaluating these at Eastern Health in the subsequent 2025 accreditation.

“The dashboards will be evaluated from both an IT and health services research perspective, for example evaluating their usability, looking at uptake, determining technical issues with their ongoing use, seeing how they impact patient outcomes and hospital workflow,”

Australian Council on Healthcare Standards CEO, Dr Karen Luxford said that on completion, the project will develop a roadmap for Australian hospitals to adopt live digital dashboards with new models to support proactive, continuous quality improvement and accreditation.

“Safe, quality care is important every day. Use of real time data will support hospitals to review the quality of care delivered and provide information for the external evaluation of health care services through accreditation. The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards is delighted to be a partner in this project focussed on the future of healthcare,” said Dr Luxford.

The implementation of the digital dashboards will benefit a number of hospital areas, including clinical governance; preventing and controlling healthcare-associated infection; medication safety; comprehensive care; blood management; recognising and responding to acute deterioration; communicating for safety; and partnering with consumers.

The project will be led by Monash University Faculty of Information Technology and Eastern Health Clinical School, The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards, Eastern Health and the Department of Health (Victoria) are collaborators.

The four-year project will demonstrate the impact of the dashboard framework on clinical practice, hospital audit teams and external accreditation.