Unaffordable innovation? The rising cost of patient care

The past two years have seen Australia’s medical industry undergo significant changes, with e-health and telehealth quickly becoming the norm. The industry has already seen the implementation of ePrescriptions and new MBS items to support remote care as more practices adopt telehealth services to reach and treat patients effectively. However, as digital care becomes more prevalent, practitioners are faced with fragmented and, at times, difficult-to-obtain patient records. They also face growing compliance challenges around the transfer, storage and management of sensitive patient information.

In response, the government has begun exploring methods of connecting and consolidating patient data to offer complete record visibility. With the application of AI, there is also the potential to aid practitioners in delivering hyper individualised treatment. Still, the rapid adoption of multiple new technologies comes at a cost, with private practitioners within the industry facing mounting tech expenses driven by the need to innovate faster to stay competitive.

With so many new technologies out there, how does a practice discern which are truly shaping the future of patient care and prioritise accordingly? And what challenges does the industry need to overcome to see the right platforms implemented at scale?

AI and patient care

AI has been breaking ground in the healthcare sector by assisting practitioners in tackling practical challenges. However, the most exciting application for specialists and general practitioners is ‘hyper individualised treatment’. Hyper individualised treatment develops patient-specific tailored treatments based on more than a diagnosis. In combination with AI, the level of depth this approach provides reduces diagnosis time, improves treatment accuracy and provides practitioners with insights that may have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Despite numerous benefits, privacy issues, such as how much data access is given, what kind and how it’s handled, make the implementation of machine learning difficult unless highly restricted. Further, supporting such complex systems will require the use of foundational tools that help monitor and support the performance of and access to critical data. Fortunately, AI-enabled monitoring already exists and is used by many companies to keep existing databases up and running efficiently. The technology is there but to evolve the industry will need to reassess its approaches to consolidated record keeping, compliance and privacy.

Continuity of care in a fragmented system

‘Continuity of care’ is the holistic management of a patient by a single practitioner or within a network of providers. Substantial bodies of literature outline the benefits of continuity of care, from improved patient satisfaction to reduced avoidable hospitalisation. Record visibility is a crucial aspect of continuity of care, due to the fact that having a complete understanding of a patient’s medical history is essential to prescribing the best treatment. While initiatives such as My Health Record have had success addressing record visibility issues within the public space, the adoption of these systems remains low amongst private practitioners. The challenge is not the concept itself but the numerous services and rising costs that underpin the program and managing these in an efficient fashion. Affordability must be a primary consideration, and what practitioners require are streamlined digital solutions, particularly concerning unified observability and record keeping, that remove unnecessary complexity from what should be a straightforward process.

The cost of compliance

All healthcare providers in Australia have professional and legal obligations to protect their patients’ health information. Different specialisations have different requirements; however, the new challenge is managing patient data compliance across hybrid physical and digital environments. In the past, patient record regulations focused on the physical storing of information, but as digital records expand, practitioners face a slew of additional criteria. Moreover, today larger practices that house sizable amounts of patient data spend excessive time and resources switching between tools to gain insight into issues and spot problems. Consolidating systems and tools through a unified observability platform will allow healthcare IT specialists to view the performance of these systems through a single platform, and this approach can be applied to every system: from security to data storage. It can cut down on costs, and make collaboration across teams, offices and practices easier.

Making innovation affordable

Amidst fragmented systems and complex privacy requirements, practitioners are spread thin, and with data sprawled across on-premises and digital, costs can easily compound. For example, like many healthcare organisations, Bupa Australia relies on a vast network infrastructure to support its operations. Following a series of acquisitions in 2017, its IT team noted that the large number of different tools Bupa used for IT monitoring was neither efficient nor cost-saving. As a result, the organisation made the decision to modernise. They deployed a cloud-based observability and monitoring solution across two main data centres. Doing so allowed the team to quickly eliminate extraneous monitoring tools to streamline operations. Their new platform also helped the team automate time-consuming processes.

COVID-19 has pushed the healthcare industry forward in many ways; however, fragmented patient data and costly and complex systems are still holding the industry back. Furthermore, healthcare institutions employ a vast array of technologies to operate on a daily basis, and if one part of that technological ecosystem goes down, it can have a huge knock-on effect. To advance, the industry must address the urgent need for better IT management of the critical technologies that form the foundation of patient care such as observability. It’s time to start practising essential ‘technology self-care’ for the platforms that power modern health care and establish the foundation for future innovation.

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