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Patient using one of Mater’s apps
With a flood of new COVID cases – especially the more contagious Omicron variant – hospitals in NSW and Queensland are turning to new technologies to stay on top of the crisis.
Sydney’s St Vincent’s Health Network and Brisbane’s Mater have developed digital systems that let COVID patients receive monitoring in the comfort of their own homes, while still receiving top-class medical care.
The St Vincent’s@Home Care service has been used by more than 2000 patients since August, many of whom may otherwise have required hospital admission or missed out on such close monitoring.
Daniel Luafalealo, Manager, Virtual Care and Systems Innovation at St Vincent’s, says the St Vincent’s@Home app is an example of how the hospital is keeping patients safe while using really exciting, really advanced technology.
The app is part of a shared platform developed by Sydney-based Caremonitor. St Vincent’s was one of its first clients, and worked closely with the company to help further develop it.
“Patients can be at home uploading their vital signs without having to come to the hospital and this frees up space for the critically unwell,” Mr Luafalealo says.
“Having a patient-facing app that integrates with consumer devices such as smart watches is a huge step forward for healthcare in general.
“It really drives a patient centric-experience, and moves us away from the heavily clinician-centered solutions and approaches that have been prevalent until now.
“Managing that additional 2000 people in the hospital would have been a real strain on our health system, it would have been overwhelming.
“But with this solution our team has managed, and our patient experience scores have been outstanding.”
In Brisbane the Mater’s digital tool – QuestManager – is also capable of supporting thousands of patients and is already proving a success.
Mater Health Executive Director Residential Care and Community Services Fiona Hinchliffe says QuestManager, implemented by the Mater in partnership with healthcare technology company Philips, reduces the need for COVID-19 patients to be admitted and allows Mater’s Hospital in the Home (HITH) team to deliver care through virtual monitoring.
Ms Hinchliffe says that as well as easing pressure on the hospital, allowing positive cases to receive care in their own homes also helps reduce community transmission.
“We launched QuestManager on December 28 and are currently caring for more than 150 patients on our virtual ward, but we expect that number to increase,” she says.
In NSW, when a person tests positive for COVID, NSW Health uploads their details to a portal that can be accessed by the state’s health professionals.
Once St Vincent’s has access to those details patients can be contacted, assessed and, if suitable, admitted to the home care service and enrolled in the app.
“These are people who are not ill enough to come into hospital, it’s actually safer for them to be treated at home,” Mr Luafalealo says.
The app monitors and collects patients’ vital signs – temperature, pulse oximetry, respiratory rate and heart rate – and the COVID monitoring team at St Vincent’s has access to dashboards containing that information and is alerted if a patient’s condition deteriorates.
“Patients with COVID they can deteriorate quickly,” he says. “The app gives clinicians that chance to keep an eye on them and maintain a relationship with the patient, and can spot signs of deterioration sometime faster than the patients can themselves.
“They can then call the patient, make sure things are OK, and if necessary get an ambulance to them.”
The Mater’s QuestManager works in a similar fashion.
“Each patient is triaged to determine whether they are suitable for virtual care in their own home,” Ms Hinchliffe says.
“Eligible patients receive a daily SMS or email with a link to a survey they can complete on a mobile device.
“This provides our team with the clinical information they need to ensure the patient is receiving the appropriate level and type of care they need.
“It also provides us with alerts so we can become aware quickly of any deterioration in the patient’s health and can escalate their care through telehealth or an in-home visit by our Covid HITH clinical team.”
Ms Hinchliffe says the Mater’s HITH team can provide Pulse Oximeter devices to appropriate patients where required.
A patient can then simply measure their blood oxygen levels with the device (also available through a feature on a smartwatch) and submit the results online for monitoring.
