Melbourne hospitals launch digital health initiative to enhance patient journey

Digital and Innovation: A Melbourne health services provider has rolled out a new digital health initiative with an aim to create a command centre to support the oversight and management of patient flow and care pathways and also establish the foundational capabilities to remotely care for patients in their own home.

Alcidion’s Miya Flow solution has been deployed to improve the flow of patients across Alfred Health’s three hospitals. The solution integrates with the Alfred Health Electronic Medical Record and consolidates data in real time from source systems to present an intuitive view that supports patient care and enables proactive referral management and discharge planning.

Replacing manual whiteboards consisting of patient data with an Electronic Patient Journey Board provides the ability to eliminate duplication of data, minimise manual data entry and promote timely safe discharge.

Alfred Health’s Chief Digital Health Officer, Amy McKimm, said “We realise the benefit of using our investment in digital health information to improve patient movement and flow. These new tools are designed to provide at-a-glance access to the status of a patient’s journey – information that will also be used to inform operations and planning.”

At a recent panel discussion, Mark Simpson, Chief Clinical Information Officer, eHealth NSW said that this is a pivotal moment where we have the opportunity to harmonise digital health, especially from the state’s perspective.

“We need to engage and support the expectations of the citizen and not only when they’re a patient, but actually in their environment of wellbeing. In the last few years, there’s been a significant shift in the expectation for delivery of connected health from wellbeing through to primary and into secondary care.

“A challenge for the coming years is to actually have an overarching strategy not only for state health, but also with our colleagues from Commonwealth and dare I say with our interstate colleagues.”

The implementation of Miya Access is said to further provide end-to-end bed management workflows to promote efficient and effective communication and transfer of patient flow information between ward/department staff and the Bed Assignment Office. It supports better patient flow, decreases outliers and improves the efficiency of care delivery from ED through to discharge.

Complementing these journey boards and the data collected, Miya Command works in the background to provide all wards and departments with an overview of upcoming patient volume, patient movements, bottlenecks and discharge barriers.

Implementation of Miya Precision has provided the staff at Alfred Health with an understanding of the status of all patients across all facilities in real time, without relying on telephone and messaging systems. Information displayed will also provide a central point of focus for activities like ward rounds and discharge planning.

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