One way Northern Health, a major provider in Melbourne's north, is creating value for its patients and community, is by enabling its clinicians to offer virtual options. 

THE PROBLEM

It began during the pandemic. As with the rest of the industry, the organisation too had to accelerate its digital transformation by embracing digital tools for delivering remote care. However, they had to make do with little technologies available to them back then. "Systems were clunky, there was little or limited integration of our systems and poor interoperability," recalled Dr Katharine See, chief health outcomes officer and director of Respiratory Medicine at Northern Health.

Once the dust settled, they realised that they could never go back to the way things were before. Northern Health is now receiving over 114,000 admissions each year; its emergency department alone treats over 111,000 patients annually with the auxiliary Victorian Virtual Emergency Department now attending to calls from more than 103,000 patients. 

"Much of our care reverted to a traditional face-to-face model following the relaxation of COVID restrictions. Given our rapidly growing population, we recognised the need to do things fundamentally differently."

Dr Katharine See, Chief Health Outcomes Officer, Director of Respiratory Medicine, Northern Health

Indeed, the rising demand for health services due to an ageing population, along with the expected increase in chronic disease cases and persistent issues in accessing primary care, necessitates changing the way care is delivered – particularly one that leverages digital technology, according to Uri Bettesh, CEO and founder of Israel and United States-based Datos Health.

As a region, Australia/New Zealand pushes towards building a digitally-enabled healthcare system. "The crucial element for ANZ as we see it is the need to implement solutions to increasing workforce pressures with proven innovative models," Bettesh noted. Besides workforce solutions, enabling the real-time exchange of information between and among patients and care teams is also imperative to "prevent siloed care and support transitions of care which are so crucial in care continuity and health outcomes."

PROPOSAL

Taking a value-based approach to providing care, Northern Health started extending virtual options, first to its lung cancer patients. 

"As the lead for the Lung Tumour Stream, I regularly reviewed the findings from the Victorian Lung Cancer Registry report, which showed that we were performing well compared to other healthcare providers. However, relying solely on administrative data had limitations, leaving us without a definitive measure of whether we were meeting the outcomes that mattered most to our patients and community," Dr See shared.

"We decided [that] we needed to develop a digital care pathway to measure what matters most to our patients to address this," she added.

They eventually found success in that project. Recognising its benefits, it was a natural next step to digitise other patient pathways across the organisation – but it had to be through a single platform that could handle multiple use cases. 

In that single platform, Northern Health specifically looked for the following key requirements: flexible and easy to use; interoperability; automates workflows; expands clinical reach and drives clinical efficiency; reduces clinician burden; increases patient self-management and agency; and multilingual. 

The organisation found a partner in New York-headquartered Datos Health, which offers the Open Care platform for the delivery of hybrid care.

From this implementation, the organisation hopes to achieve the following outcomes:

• improved equity and accessibility

• maximise return on investment by investing in secondary prevention (such as cardiac rehabilitation)

• increased activation and improved self-management

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

Datos offers a comprehensive open platform for customising care plans according to both clinicians' and patients' needs. Clinicians can either create their care plans from scratch or choose from over 200 templates that can be tweaked and adjusted by patient population, acuity levels, and devices, among other factors. Different departments of an organisation can also tailor their care plans based on system integrations, preferred use of AI, and device integrations.

Open Care helps automate tasks by automatically sending instructions, education, and directed actions to patients, as well as reminders to take medication, complete questionnaires, or measure vitals via the companion mobile application CareApps.

"Choosing an open solution for remote health monitoring ensures adaptability to our diverse community needs. By utilising a customisable cloud-based platform, we can enable our clinicians to track our patients longitudinally through the alerting system and understand who is at higher risk of deterioration. This allows us to effectively prioritise their care," Dr See explained.

Together with Datos' Australian partner IKAO Health, Northern Health will integrate Open Care across various patient pathways, including cardiac rehabilitation, back pain, severe asthma and gestational diabetes. There is also a plan to expand it to its community healthcare programs. 

"We are planning to go live with four programs within the next three months with an additional 10 in the pipeline by year's end. We are currently in the process of finalising integrations," an IKAO Health representative disclosed.

RESULTS

Thus far, Northern Health staff have been "overwhelmingly positive" about the virtual care platform. The organisation even have a "long waiting list" of staff keen to implement it in their respective programs, Dr See mentioned.

Reflecting on their take on value-based care by leveraging virtual tools, Dr See shared:

"A virtual model of care positively impacts value-based care by enhancing access to healthcare through implementing new technology, empowering our patients to engage in their own healthcare, reducing costs associated with traditional in-person visits, utilising data analytics to support continuous quality improvement efforts for our models of care. By leveraging virtual care platforms, Northern Health can deliver more accessible, patient-centred, cost-effective, and high-quality care that aligns with the objectives of value-based care models, ultimately improving health outcomes and patient satisfaction while optimising resource utilisation. The transition from inpatient to community-based care focuses on shifting from reactive to proactive care, ultimately creating value for both patients and the healthcare system."