Time for change in Digital Health - the Yellowpages of Health and Social Care Services?

Have you read the recent WHO "Health and care workforce in Europe: time to act"

The Region (EU) is at a critical juncture. Strategic planning and smart investment are crucial next steps in supporting our health and care workers to deliver on the promises of ensuring health for all, and leaving no one – including our health and care professionals – behind. It is time to act. (Quote from the document)

All countries in the EU and indeed, almost every country is facing a crisis in Healthcare, one notable example is manpower, for example, the NHS with 110,000 vacancies unfilled,

Health sectors globally are facing unprecedented pressure from increasing rates of chronic disease, an ageing population, and increasing financial costs. ?

Despite extensive efforts over many years, the health sector has been unable to stem the rising demands on health services and the wider impacts on the sustainability of the health sector.

?The risks to sustainability are escalating and are potentially irreversible, given the lead time (years in most cases) to deliver effective change

?Time to rethink healthcare - "Join the Dots"

“TACKLING CHRONIC CONDITIONS AND THEIR CAUSES IS THE

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FACING AUSTRALIA’S HEALTH SYSTEM”

?AUSTRALIAN HEALTH MINISTERS’ ADVISORY COUNCIL

Do we have the basic building blocks in place?

Can you access all health and social care "SERVICES" at a local, local government, state or country level in a "Single Source of Truth" covering public, private and not-for-profit organisations with a smartphone app?

Australians can, some 400,000 services in fact covering all doctors, pharmacies, hospitals, social care, etc across eight (8) state and territory governments, lines on maps (read borders) are of "no consequence" all from a HEALTH SERVICES LIBRARY

Here are some of the data it covers

? service and practitioner details

? contact information such as opening hours, and location

? identifiers for organisations and providers

? geo-coded service locations

It is the Single Source of Truth for Health and Social Care "Services", including public, private and not-for-profit organisations

1. National Healthcare provider identifiers

Consistent service identifiers provide a stable foundation for other service access options such as "TeleHealth" and "GP After Hours" services. Agreeing to a consistent methodology to identify each health service, professional and provider mean that services are easily identifiable and mappable.

It also creates a national system where discharge summaries and referrals are transferred between services easily, e-prescriptions systems can be implemented with greater speed.

2. Evidence-based planning

An example of a software product integrating the HSL is a National Healthmap data platform.

This platform aims to help overcome the “islands of data” held across the health sector at a local, state, national and international by combining the HSL with a range of relevant health data sets, including census demographics, disease prevalence, and health outcomes.

The Healthmap demonstrates how the Health Services Library can be extended from its primary role as a foundation for national E-Health initiatives to a health data tool supporting policymakers, health planners and researchers in their broader roles or improving population health outcomes through the evidence-based decision making

Visualization of data is extremely effective in bringing complex datasets to be together to convey information in a simple Geo-Spatial (Google Maps) format.

The National Healthmap uses data from the NHSL, from which we can introduce a wide range of national datasets (e.g., census) and local health datasets to support a greater focus on evidence-based planning and decision making

DATA LINKING & INSIGHT: PERFORMANCE METRICS, WAITING LISTS

Data linking enables analyses of broader data relationships. The examples below demonstrate the linking of services to statistics to allow spatial exploration of service metrics.

Deeper insights into these metrics can then be derived through further linking and benchmarking of other relevant datasets (e.g., exploring Waiting List metrics in the context of hospital funding, capacity, regional population demographics, disease burden, benchmarking, etc.).

GP Practice Metrics

In the following example, GP Practice service metrics are spatially displayed by linking to the GP Practice location dataset, in this instance the Cervical Screening Rates per GP practice.

These metrics can be displayed at national or local levels for regional analyses.

A comprehensive range of other relevant datasets can also be linked, such as:

? Practice drug prescribing volumes (e.g. longitudinal, individual practice reports, SHA/ PCT regions)

? Practice patient characteristics (e.g., gender, age, region)

? Practice catchment areas population profiles (e.g. demographics, disease prevalence)

Cervical Cancer Screening Rates, London Boundary, Strategic Health Authority of London

Disclaimer

The CEO of AITIA Global, Laurie has been credited with getting all state and territory governments (8) in Australia to adopt two national digital health initiatives, a Health Services Libraries and a Healthmap after his success with the Victorian Human Services Directory and is a Subject Matter Expert on these topics

He has no connection with these initiatives in Australia in any shape or form

More information about Digital Health solutions in future Newsletters