Not-for-profit organization Salveo Healthcare recently introduced remote patient monitoring technology from the UK to support the delivery of preventive care in Tasmania.
In February, the company began testing Spirit Health’s Clinitouch technology as part of its home care service, Advanced Preventative Care (APC). The service is provided by registered and enrolled nurses and is offered to eligible Tasmanians with chronic illnesses.
Clinitouch is currently being integrated across four disease pathways, including COPD, diabetes, heart failure and ischemic heart disease, allowing patients to complete health questionnaires and enter vital signs at home. It also provides the APC team with the ability to remotely monitor the condition of their patients in near real-time via dashboards, enabling the identification of at-risk patients and early interventions.
Expanding home care with RPM technology couldn’t come at a more opportune time, according to Salveo, with one in four Tasmanians currently living with at least two chronic health conditions, such as heart disease or diabetes.
CEO Steve McCullagh shared Healthcare IT news more details about their ongoing RPM pilot and how they plan to succeed in adopting the digital technology – which has now been used in the UK National Health Service for over a decade – for its unique program and target group.
Q. Can you walk me through the Clinitouch pilot – how is the technology being received by your staff and physicians? How were they prepared to help patients use remote technology? What about the patients; How do they find the pilot run?
A. We are currently one month into the four-month pilot. The purpose of using this technology is to enable a nurse to remotely monitor their clients and spot early signs of deterioration so they can respond more quickly to de-escalate a condition, reduce avoidable hospital admissions and reduce the complexity of treatment due to delays can reduce.
Our nurses received in-depth training and hands-on support to upskill them for the pilot, where the team first tested the technology on themselves to experience the client interface first-hand.
In the pilot, clients use the Clinitouch app to answer multiple-choice questions about their symptoms related to the treatment of their chronic condition, along with adding some health data. This data is fed into a dashboard via algorithms that process the responses into a traffic light system, making it easy for our nurses to see how their clients are following along.
Although it is too early to assess the results of the pilot, our nurses can see the benefits of this technology in terms of improved client care, improved self-management and, most importantly, that we can respond more quickly to provide the right care at the right time to offer. They also noted that they are now seeing the benefit of this technology creating scalability, allowing more customers to benefit from the APC program.
When it comes to customer feedback, we’re pleased with initial reports that the installation process and app were simple and easy to use.
Q. How do you plan to further introduce or expand Clinitouch to your patient base?
A. The goal of our pilot is to gather feedback from our clients and nurses about their experiences using the technology to ultimately determine if it is a good fit for us. In addition, we assess whether the technology increases the capacity of nurses so that we can offer the program to more people who can benefit from it. We are trying to roll out the technology successfully in these areas broader to our current customer base and where appropriate for future programs. The current pilot focuses on general health concerns, and if successful, we would test the technology in people living with more specific, nuanced conditions.
Q. In addition to remote technology, what are the other digital technologies underlying your APC service and how do they enable care coordination, disease management and personalized care interventions?
A. Face-to-face nursing care at home is an integral part of the APC program and we value its use technology and innovation to make this service effective and efficient and ultimately allow us to do what we do best: deliver the program to people who need it. To do this we currently use DC2Vue as our EMR; the platform uses APIs to connect to other services; and we are also testing SNUG in this pilot to establish some biometric data.
Q. Why choose a platform used abroad when there are locally available healthcare technology products?
A. Two of our key considerations in every aspect of delivering our program in our home state of Tasmania are the literacy and average age of our clients. Nearly one in two Tasmanian adults is functionally illiterate. So every aspect of what we do must be easy to understand and use.
When it comes to age, one of the first questions we received whenever we mentioned the use of this technology to our customers who average age 79 was, “Will they be willing and able to use the technology?” And as I said, early reports show that customers are finding it easy and simple to use, which is also supported by data showing that the average age of those already using Clinitouch in the UK is 77 years.
Clinitouch was the best technology we identified during our broad search to meet the unique needs of our program and our customers. We discovered that Clinitouch knew that being too complicated means going unused, so they developed this technology that is smart yet simple. The platform was designed by doctors, has been awarded with proven results and is widely used in the UK NHS.
When it came to investments, the nature of our contract meant we had low financial risk, which gave us the confidence to dive in and test the technology for the APC program. We have also been well supported by the Clinitouch team, who helped us to successfully set up our pilot.
Q. What is your strategy for keeping patient data safe, especially when performing remote health monitoring?
A. The privacy of our customers is extremely important to us and that is why we place high demands on data security in everything we do. Clinitouch, with their software registered locally as a medical device with the Therapeutics Goods Administration and similarly abroad, shares our vision of high data security standards, which is reflected in our data processing agreement. A key aspect for us in Australia was that our data would be securely hosted in Australia, which Clinitouch can provide. In addition, the software is accredited by Cyber Essentials Plus and DSPT certificates, compliant with the International Data Interchange Standard (HL7/FHIR) and hosted via Microsoft Azure, which is ISO27001 accredited.