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.

We work in a hybrid healthcare system, and Cerner, an American supplier of health information technology services, is our primary electronic medical record (EMR) provider. Each department in the hospital has its sub-specialty program, which predominantly functions as the equal distribution of work in each department 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.

We must integrate systems to create one holistic platform with all the features of the new and old systems. The all-in-one platform can reduce the workload of public healthcare workers, so they don’t have to log into multiple systems to get their work done, which is efficient, saves time, and helps 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.

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

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 for use in their daily workflows. These systems fail because clinicians do not use them. IT developers and clinicians must work in unison to solve this issue and reduce the friction in technology adoption.