A national approach to NBN enabled telehealth

Serving Older Australians is one of the demonstration projects funded under the NBN Pilot site program. Rod Young writes that it aims to develop a model of home-based supported clinical monitoring with the intent of demonstrating the capacity of individuals to become actively engaged in the management of their care and services.
Serving Older Australians aims to transform the experience of the care recipient to the extent that the ‘care recipient’ in future will be known as the ‘care participant’. It may seem like semantics to be concentrating on a single word but language is important. In this instance the importance relates to the significant change in how and what we will expect of our care participants in the future.
The corollary of this is, what future care participants their families and voluntary carers will also expect from care providers. They will also expect greater control over the decisions that are made about what care and services they need or require.
Simple, Information Technology (IT) and how we use it to support care participants to better understand and manage their own health and care is the key to how this transformation of the aged care system can be achieved. More importantly it supports people to retain their independence in their own home for as long as possible.
In every survey of older persons, one of the common desires is to enable each person to remain independent, in their own home and in control of their own lives.
Therefore this NBN Project ‘Serving Older Australians’ is an important piece of work that sets out to demonstrate how persons aged over 65 years can be taught how to collect their own clinical data on a daily basis, upload that information to a common database and to work with a telehealth nurse to monitor the data, and to respond appropriately where the data indicates that agreed parameters have been breached.
Participants in the project have responded very positively to being better informed about their health status. Voluntary carers in particular feel much safer when they know that diagnostic information is being gathered and saved to a server that will send an alarm if the pre-arranged parameters are breached.
The Serving Older Australians Telehealth Project has been funded by the Commonwealth Government, Department of Health and Ageing. The project is a consortium of Leading Age Services Australia (LASA), Silverchain, IRT, Accenture and the Aged Care Industry IT Council (Aciitc).
NBN TELEHEALTH - SUPPORTING PEOPLE TO RETAIN INDEPENDENCE
IRT and Silverchain are the two aged care service providers. Between them they will recruit 180 participants in early roll out NBN locations. The primary focus will be on Kiama/Wollongong in NSW and Geraldton in WA.
Participants must be connected to the NBN, must be over 65 years and have some health issue that will benefit from home-based monitoring.
An IRT or Silverchain Telehealth Nurse will visit each new recruit and train them how to use the device to record their personal health data and how to lodge the information to the central server. The Project Consortium made the decision to not use Bluetooth as it wanted to ensure that the participant has maximum engagement and understanding of the process and is closely involved in the monitoring of their health status.
Consultation is occurring with participant GPs to both inform them of the project and to assist them to use the data in the most effective and useful format for their clinical purposes.
Accenture will undertake the project evaluation which is designed to assess whether there has been improved health outcomes for the participants, overall savings to the health system and more appropriate and timely interventions.
Accenture has also been charged with exploring how the collected data might in future be linked to the PCeHR. If linkage to the PCeHR is possible what would be the most appropriate format, how would the information be retrieved and used by other health professionals such as the participant’s GP?
The project has also been designed to ensure an analysis of how the program could be built into a national solution and what infrastructure would be required to scale the project into a model that could be used on a national basis.
Serving Older Australians will run until mid 2014 and must provide a report to the Department by 30 June next year.
Though it is still early days the enthusiasm of the participants who have already signed up is quite infectious and dispels the oft claimed statement that older people cannot use technology.
The Consortium participants look forward to being able to provide a more substantial assessment of the Project in second half 2014.
“Participants must be connected to the NBN, must be over 65 years and have some health issue that will benefit from home-based monitoring.”
ROD YOUNG has more than 30 years’ experience working in the health and aged care industries. His experience includes 10 years in health service management and 13 years in aged care. His most recent role was as CEO of Aged Care Association Australia.
During his career Rod has had extensive experience in managing complicated infrastructure projects, managing a teaching hospital complex, working on health systems re-design, developing health and aged care policy reform.
He has a Bachelor of Law from UNSW and a Bachelor of Health Services Management also from UNSW.
He has, during his time as CEO Aged Care Association, had an ongoing and active involvement in the development of IT in the seniors environment, including being the founder of the Aged Care Industry IT Council