Digital Disruption in Australian Healthcare : Myth or Opportunity?

Eastern Health’s digital hospital transformation which has proved to be positively disruptive, include:

• The mitigation of medication errors through electronic medication management, including drug and allergy alerts;

• The mitigation of transcription errors into the medical record with the integration of medical devices (connected to the patient) to the EMR with early warning scoring to identify patient deterioration;

• Alerting algorithms that use data points from patient clinical observations to alert for critical medical conditions such as sepsis; and

• The use of personal health devices in the home for monitoring patients with chronic disease to prevent hospitalisation.

While, using major technology platforms such as Cerner Millennium enables the transformation of clinical work at the patient bed side, the use of data stored in the EMR provides a significant opportunity for translational research and hospital reform. The information and insights available from data mining the EMR also form the basis for clinical data analytics and the broader application of health data science. This area may possibly hold the greatest opportunity for digital disruption in Australian healthcare. The disruptive potential, however, is yet to be fully explored and realised.

In order to achieve success the following challenges impacting digital disruption in the Australian health sector need to be addressed:

• Effective and simplified regulation that supports the patient’s rights while facilitating improved use of data. This includes unifying laws that safeguard patient data use particularly in relation data integrity, information privacy, data sharing and security. This builds consumer trust in the regulatory environment that supports the patient’s information;

• Sustainable operation of ICT platforms including elimination of legacy systems within the challenging economic environment (this issue is not unique to Australia). This builds trust from all stakeholders that the systems that house critical information are resilient and robust;

• The need for safe and high quality systems that are reliable, resilient, secure and support clinicians daily work that mitigate clinical risk rather than add to it. This builds clinician trust in the digital method and addresses adoption barriers to new technologies; and

• Including the patient’s voice in digital transformation decision making particularly in light of increased patient expectations and improved patient literacy. This builds patient trust that the information provided is responsive to the patient’s needs.

Digital disruption in healthcare promises to be an exciting opportunity in the years to come. Areas of digital disruption, innovation and transformation are maturing across the Australian healthcare system at varying rates. While Australia has progressed along the path of many countries with introduction of EMRs and interoperability between hospital and community based information systems, the power of digital disruption is likely to come from clinical data analytics and the potential this has in translational research. More importantly, as the health sector has amassed a high degree of trust when delivering patient care, so must there be a high degree of trust in digital disruption risk management. It is only when there is a high level of trust amongst the patient, the clinician, the hospital and primary health system that digital disruption is likely to accelerate.