What it is

The Smart Health approach is to streamline treatment, reduce test duplication and automate interactions between patients, healthcare providers and payer organisations. The three critical aspects addressed are quality of care, patient safety and costs through an advanced approach to Information Management.

The Smart Health Solutions approach evolved from the ground up. Initial product development was based on strict healthcare provider requirements and applying appropriate technologies to meet those requirements. The outcome of this project was Smart Patient Data, which first went live in May 2000. Smart Patient Data specifically addresses care quality, patient safety and the costs associated with inefficiencies in current communication and information sharing mechanisms. It provides a means of reducing existing operational and administration costs by introducing uniform, convenient, many to many information management.

Doctors, other care providers and staff spend hours per week on the phone, playing telephone tag and returning calls to exchange information. Smart Patient Data is a standards compliant, secure Internet application that makes patient information available to participating care providers at the point of care.

“I have no idea what happens to my patients when they are admitted to hospital.” – General Practitioner refrain.

Smart Health Solutions is uniquely positioned. It has several years’ experience successfully implementing Smart Patient Data.

It provides:

  • Availability of clinical information to doctors and other providers
  • Improvements in the quality of care by making critical information available at all points of care
  • Mitigation of risk through better provision of information
  • Reduced administrative costs of disseminating clinical information, including reducing telephone calls, faxes, mail and courier charges
  • Ensuring that patients’ privacy is protected by the implementation of secure systems, procedures and storage of clinical data

Benefits:

  • Privacy and Security
  • Time and Cost Savings
  • HealthConnect and Standards Compliance
  • Fully Scalable
  • Case Management Tool

The Smart Health Approach is the premier solution enabling shared Electronic Health Records amongst doctors and other healthcare providers. It is simple to use, low cost and proven. It complies with Commonwealth Government security standards, delivering privacy and security for patients and the health industry.

The Smart Health Approach is a many-to-many HealthConnect compliant solution for information management and dissemination. Smart Patient Data provides a long term, cost effective approach to the implementation of shared Electronic Health Records. One-to-one and e-mail solutions do not solve the problem of access to up to date clinical information for chronic patients that typically require health care services from multiple disciplines. The cost savings to healthcare providers and payers that use shared EHRs are substantial.

The many-to-many Patient Centric shared EHR approach provides support for clinicians in their normal practice environments: homes, offices, private clinics, outpatients or a hospital ward. Many-to-many means that once information is posted to the secure data repository, it is available to all of the many health care providers that may provide care to that patient in the future.

The program is compatible with and enhances existing healthcare software solutions. To implement the Smart Health Approach healthcare providers require recent model workstations (PCs) with Internet connectivity. Patients and healthcare providers require secure tokens (such as smart cards) to use the product over the Internet. The card is the electronic system key. The industry needs access to patients’ clinical information. Patients want secure, confidential records and knowledge based care. Providers and payers want to minimise costs and save time – maximising efficiency. Smart Health meets these requirements.

The Smart Health Approach provides on-line access to event summaries provided by healthcare peers (radiology, pathology, specialists, etc.). It provides doctors in the community with immediate access to hospitalisation information. Many of these communications are currently paper-based, rely on the patient’s memory or are simply non-existent. Doctors waste valuable time trying to communicate with each other to learn about patient treatment. The Smart Health Approach saves time, removes the guesswork and enables doctors to get on with providing quality treatment.

Smart Health enables general practitioners, specialists, hospitals and other authorised healthcare providers to share patient information in a simple, user friendly and secure manner. It is flexible, extensible, and simple to rollout to participants.

The Smart Health Approach is a secure on-line information management solution for one to many sharing of summary patient information. It integrates secure web technologies and public key infrastructure to deliver patient summary Electronic Health Records to the desktops of participating healthcare providers. It provides an industry strength security and privacy framework. Each healthcare provider requires an individual token with an associated private key certificate. Typically the secure token is a smart card, which is used to establish a secure session over the Internet to the server.

As each patient is treated, the patient’s card is used to “point” directly to the individual patient’s data on the server. When a patient leaves a hospital, discharge information is posted to the secure data repository. When the patient visits a general practitioner, the doctor can access the patient’s clinical records, including the latest information, on-line. The record can then be supplemented with a new visit event summary. In this way the patient’s clinical history is built up over time, providing essential clinical information to all authorised healthcare providers.

All information is stored in a highly secure environment and is encrypted during transmission over the Internet using Commonwealth mandated security products. The data repository environment is a Gatekeeper and ASIO Certified Telstra iTrust Centre.