NSLHD Digital Strategy 2021-2026

2.1 Current state assessment, top down approach (1/2)

While our LHD has, over the years, utilised technology to improve delivery of care and enhance operations, many opportunities still exist to utilise digital technologies to better enable delivery of our strategic plan and focus areas. These are the key digital impediments to advancing our strategic plan as perceived and articulated by our staff.

Healthy communities

Connected person- centred care

Evidence-based decision making

► The technology required to keep our communities healthy is quickly maturing, for example by detecting and intervening in community health settings. ► While major advancements were made in virtual care models during the COVID-19 pandemic, more can be done. Significant investment will be needed for our LHD to expand the use of virtual technologies through enhanced models of care, where appropriate, that address health issues or patient deterioration before or post hospitalisation for instance. ► It is recognised that the community is ready to access and use virtual care mechanisms. Investments however need to be made to ensure the communities digital and health literacy as well as equitable access. ► Furthermore, opportunities exist to utilise data and predictive analytics to help our LHD identify community trends and issues that can be addressed by social and target interventions.

► The digital end-to-end patient experience is at its infancy, underpinned by a combination of manual and digital processes. Patients do not have the ability to ‘take control’ of their health journey with self -service tools or digital services e.g.: electronic bookings, appointment management, digital pre-admission forms etc. ► Furthermore, the process of unifying records across care settings is still highly disconnected creating the need for the patient to continue being the conduit of information sharing. For example, most referrals from GPs to hospitals are still paper based and the quality of discharge summaries is lacking, if ever delivered back to the referrer. ► This fragmentation continues to make providing holistic clinical care difficult especially in cohorts where it is needed the most, for example, when aged care residents move between hospital and residential care. ► Many specialist clinical systems have been enabled outside the core clinical application (eMR) resulting in a hybrid medical record for patients, something that has the potential to undermine care.

► While we collect a lot of data in our day to day work, and while we have many reports and dashboards, it is still very difficult to derive insights from the data to truly drive change. Often, our staff must manually join data across multiple dashboards and systems to achieve something useful. For example, many opportunities exist across the eMR to use the data entered to help the clinician drive better decisions. ► Furthermore, many dashboards are a few weeks or months behind further hindering the usefulness of the data. Data must be live and always available and accessible. ► Predictive analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligences capabilities for service planning, demand management and clinical decision support are still developing. ► Clinical research and trial management is highly manual or fragmented across multiple systems. Generally, it is difficult for researching clinicians to access the data they need. ► IT equipment is not tracked and managed through its lifecycle using automated means, resulting in lost inventory, a lack of visibility of what is available and frequently outdated equipment frustrating and disempowering our staff.

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