How technology is enabling rural and remote communities access to world-class healthcare

Rural and remote Australian communities face barriers to healthcare due to geographic spread, low population density, limited infrastructure, and the associated costs of servicing these areas. Technology has an increasing role to play in improving access and quality of care for all.

In northern Queensland, Townsville University Hospital (TUH) has taken the lead, with a range of innovative technology solutions across the hospital designed to improve performance, redundancy, scalability, and flexibility in an evolving digital environment.

TUH’s transformation shows what’s possible for healthcare across Australia, highlighting the opportunities of a digitised health sector.

Information sharing for equitable access

Around 28% of the Australian population lives in rural and remote areas. With higher rates of chronic disease than those living in larger centres, we must address the barriers to access these communities face.

In a country as large as ours, physically bridging the distance isn’t always an option — but the right digital infrastructure can improve information sharing and the quality of the healthcare provided in tertiary hospitals servicing these areas.

Queensland Health’s Digital Strategy for Rural and Remote Healthcare puts this into practice. Currently, limited infrastructure and siloed information in rural and remote Queensland impact health and well-being in these communities; the strategy seeks to deliver equitable access to healthcare.

It’s designed to improve patient care, support clinicians with the right tools for real-time clinical information and provide better care and coordination with healthcare partners.

How new technology is improving healthcare at TUH

As the tertiary referral hospital for Townsville Hospital and Health Service (HHS), it supports a population of almost 250,000 people across northern Queensland, including isolated indigenous communities.

Previously, TUH relied on older technologies requiring manual entry. Now, TUH uses Dell PowerStore as a single storage platform to provide block-based storage and a centralised data lake, the foundation of its ward management and patient flow reporting systems supporting the hospital’s mixed workloads. The implementation saw significant growth in clinical media from pathology, microbiology, cardiology, and sleep studies. Crucially, staff can perform near real-time reporting instead of batch processing, improving efficiency and access to current information.

TUH also implemented Dell PowerScale, which provides a single repository for unstructured data, providing a highly available and cost-effective architecture. Together, the new storage solutions provide TUH with additional performance, improved redundancy, scalability and flexibility.

Townsville HHS Director of Information Technology Services Digital Health and Knowledge Barry Koch said Dell Technologies provided a collaborative and health-centric solution in a complex environment to support patients, clinicians and staff’s digital journey.

Armed with data to support informed decision-making, clinicians can continue to provide lifesaving and life-supporting care, which is critical when patients may have already travelled long distances to receive care.

At the same time, the hospital can appropriately share data with other community service providers to enhance the population’s health. Data can inform research, education, and targeted outreach prevention programs, proactively improving health outcomes in rural and remote communities.

“We want to be the leader of healthcare in the northern region of QLD. It’s a blank canvas at the moment; we can implement change in an agile fashion using scalable solutions that Dell Technologies is continually innovating,” Koch said.

Delivering the highest level of care to all

The success of TUH is promising, and the results are both scalable and repeatable. If hospitals everywhere can deploy similar solutions, we can offer quality healthcare to all — regardless of where in Australia they call home.

Image credit: iStock.com/Geber86