Published on the 16/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Hospital CIOs should take a leaf out of just-in-time manufacturing’s book, harnessing ICT to streamline operations in order to dramatically slash waiting times and speed treatment…
Australia’s hospital CIOs and administrators should implement new technology to streamline processes and underpin better models of care if they want to aspire to what is being delivered internationally. Andrew Howard, global e-health director for Orion Systems, a New Zealand-based software company, will this week deliver a presentation at the Health Informatics Conference in Adelaide where he will describe what is possible in such a “hospital of the future”.
Howard is well versed in the sector having previously headed the Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record team for the National E-Health Transition Authority, and acted as CIO for Victoria’s health and human services department.
Speaking to iStart ahead of the HIC conference, Howard acknowledged that policy impediments and “perverse” funding models for Australia’s public hospitals, meant there were few incentives for investment in ICT to streamline health services. He also noted that investment in ICT could be politically harder to justify than investment in new beds, which had led to a “tremendous lack of spending on IT in hospitals”.
However he said that hospitals and administrators should look at international progress in the field to see how costs could be saved and treatment improved by streamlining operations and judicious application of IT.
He acknowledged that few hospitals would be able to afford the $100 million investment needed to replace legacy information systems, but argued that they could instead begin to install systems which could provide clinical views of the 80-120 applications that were typically installed across Australian hospitals. These clinical views could then be used by healthcare professionals, in conjunction with electronic health records, to streamline and speed the delivery of healthcare services.
He pointed to Thailand’s Bumrungrad Hospital as an example of a facility which had deployed technology to support clinical workflow and typically took an hour to examine, diagnose and begin treatment on a patient. “The median visit is 45 minutes,” said Howard, adding that in Australian hospitals the same journey involving pathology tests, radiology, a visit to a specialist, diagnosis and treatment could take up to a month.
Howard said Bumrungrad had adopted a just-in-time approach to patient management and was attracting patients from all over the world as a result, being one of the pioneers of so called “medical tourism”.
