Solving The Complexities Of Telehealth Processes For Healthcare Workers

Could You Tell Us About Yourself And Your Roles In Austin Health?

I am the medical director of Radiology at Austin Health. The radiology department works for the public health system in Victoria, Australia, and has conducted about 180,000 examinations of emergency inpatient and outpatient cohorts. We serve our community and carry out responsibilities, including spreading information about the hospitals to stakeholders.

Cerner, an American supplier of health information technology services, is our primary electronic medical record (EMR) provider in terms of technology since we work on a hybrid healthcare system. Each department in the hospital has its own sub-specialty program, which predominantly functions in which the department members perform their work, and the equal distribution of work occurs.

What Are Some Challenges That You Face In The Telehealth Industry?

The hospital environment is complex, many legacy IT systems often don’t fit with each other very well, and the investment and expertise required to maintain those IT systems are high. The challenge is that unless new IT systems or technologies don’t integrate with the hospital’s existing ones, the new systems are not very useful, no matter how wonderful.

One of the tricks of integrating new systems into an existing system is putting different strands of IT systems into one platform, reducing the workload of public healthcare workers. With only one platform to work with, workers don’t have to log into multiple systems to get their work done, which is efficient, takes up lesser time, and saves the workers from burnout.

How Is Telehealth Changing The Medtech Industry, And How Can Companies Adopt These Technologies To Treat Patients Remotely?

Since it is challenging, expensive, and anxiety-provoking for patients to travel to far-away metropolitan hospitals to receive treatment, telehealth has been a lifesaver for both the patient and healthcare provider. Although remote healthcare and telehealth have been used for a long time, they enabled worldwide traction due to the COVID-19 pandemic out of necessity. Many financial changes were made to the billing processes to fit the telehealth method of providing healthcare and to make telehealth work everywhere.

However, different clinicians and healthcare providers also have mixed feelings about telehealth. Some providers see the value of it in reaching and helping remote patients who live far away. At the same time, some clinicians find the loss of face-to-face conversation challenging to clinically assess the patient because the important nonverbal cues from the patient get lost in a telehealth consultation.

What Are The Upcoming Trends And Developing Technologies In Radiology And The Telehealth Space?

Our organization has invested heavily in the office 365 platform. There are many opportunities to use technology through some of these innovations at a daily workflow level, like getting paperwork authorized.

There are a lot of opportunities in office 365 to make all our processes electronic and more accountable and to give clinicians more time in the day to complete their tasks. The public health system has a real opportunity to look at the process efficiently and handle daily processes with efficient technology. There are a lot of opportunities to take care of manual and time-consuming processes with technology, but there needs to be more momentum to make those changes.

We created our own single-view communication platform in 2020 for bookings and feedback with our patients, which leverages existing IT platforms within the organization. Patients communicate with us through the app. Our previous form of communication, which was writing and sending letters to patients about their appointment dates, was not very effective since the letter would reach the intended patient after the booked date. The platform allows patients to confirm, rebook, cancel, and get specific preparation information about their appointments.

We also designed an easy-to-use phone app that involves the same process and user interface as the singleview platform and can be used by people who are not technologically sound. The application system is designed with the user in mind, which means that the questions have to be straightforward, so only the basic information is taken to facilitate the booking. This increased our engagement by 80 percent, and our older patients also engaged in this platform at a rate of 78 percent.

Through the process, patients receive a text message the day after their appointment, and they can rate their experience and write specific feedback. The feedback is assessed, and the services are evolved and developed according to the feedback given to be on par with patients’ expectations.

What Advice Would You Like To Give To Your Peers Or Industry Leaders?

IT developers and companies must engage with their clinicians and be responsive and receptive to their needs. There is a lot of fatigue among clinicians around the functioning of IT systems because they are often not designed with them in mind, so they are not intuitive to use in their daily workflows. These systems will fail because clinicians will not use them. There are a lot of IT products in the market whose configurability to the local user is limited or it’s so complicated that no one can work out how to do it. In these cases, IT developers can explain to clinicians how a certain technology works and reduce their workload by decreasing the difficulty level of the technology used.