Neverfail
Paul Cooper – independent eHealth expert, Gary Trytell – Epworth HealthCare, and Anthony Tham – Escient, discuss one of Epworth HealthCare’s key initiatives to better support patients through digital mobility solutions.
— Paul Cooper
eHealth expert, Deakin University
In thinking about the digital health landscape, we’re in a new era and that’s been the increased rise of mobility-enabled digital health – so providing information through to into the hand of clinicians, but also into the hand of patients.
Patients in their homes will be able to access the information, make bookings, appointments. All of these things are now starting to become enabled through mobility health.
The need for mobility in healthcare
— Gary Trytell
Deputy Chief Information Officer, Epworth HealthCare
From a strategy perspective, what we’re trying to do is extend the continuum of care. Epworth has already started on the journey of implementing technology in the hospital. Now we want to extend that and provide mobility solutions for patients before they come to hospital and after they leave.
If we can keep that relationship with our patients before they have to come to hospital and keep them well. That’s the ideal outcome for us.
The challenges that we’ve got that we’re trying to address is providing the right information to the right people, at the right time, on their own devices, and that’s what the mobility project’s all about. We know as part of that digital vision and strategy, the thing we need to do is pull it together all into one framework and ensure we can address the issue of legacy systems, and moving more towards more of a digital ecosystem.
We know we haven’t got all the skills in-house and in order for us to be the best provider we can possibly be, we need to understand what those advances and changes all are.
Escient was able to work with us to define what’s the strategic direction we should take and what sort of framework do we need to put in place to implement further mobility solutions to meet the needs of our organisation.
We really are in a new golden age as far as patient-centred care is concerned. I think we’ll be able to deploy a lot more capability into the healthcare setting in a very short period of time, with the tools we’ve got available.
Developing the strategy
— Anthony Tham
Director, Escient
The strategy was about giving Epworth the confidence to move forward. The three stages were about building the foundation, finding impactful applications to deliver quickly, and then accelerating.
The future of work and employee value propositions are really relying upon a solid mobility strategy. We were looking to provide the organisation with the flexibility to work where they need to and access information where they need it.
Co-creating the strategy with Epworth is really important to us so we tested our views and our thoughts on the strategy all along the way, and Epworth provided us with lots of great feedback, and the strategy ends up being developed jointly. For doctors, it was a lot about accessing information when they’re on the road. For nurses, it’s about communicating with doctors. For patients, it’s a lot about how they engage with Epworth before they arrive in hospital but also being able to access their own medical information if some of their history and the interactions with Epworth that’s really important to them.
