Context: Our US technical partner pingmd and Children’s Hospital of Orange County, LA

Medteryx was appointed as the Australian/NZ distributor for pingmd a highly innovative eHealth communication platform rapidly expanding across the US. pingMD was voted by PC Magazine, as one of the top 10 healthcare apps changing healthcare for the better in the US. (pingMD was recently acquired)

As part of working with pingMD we visited Children’s Hospital Orange County (CHOC) in Los Angeles to witness first hand how hospital specialists use Digital Health to build referral networks with their colleagues and primary care physicians.  We also learned how they use the secure pingmd app to capture photos, videos, and text based referrals; and how they use pingmd to interact with patients who provide relevant information via pingmd to their care team for immediate feedback. Pingmd is currently being integrated with Cerner at CHOC Children’s (a HIMSS Level 7 facility) to ensure a seamless electronic medical record.

Results delivered

• Children’s Hospital of Orange County have rolled-out pingmd to over 250 hospital specialists
• In September 2015, CHOC Children’s was successful in winning a US$17 million US government grant to roll out better integrated care to GPs and community specialists leveraging pingmd as their enabling eHealth platform.

Context: Large Hospital Group with over 40 hospitals and busy operating theatre suites (~10 operating theatres per Surgical suite)

• Scope: Reduce late starts, turnaround times, early finishes, and late-in-evening ward transfers
• Ensure safe practices are measured and maintained -eg Time Out
• Ensure clinician/surgeon engagement

Results delivered

• Our experience indicates biggest benefit reported by front front-line operating theatre staff is a less stressful workplace
• Our typical KPI trend results for operating theatre capacity improvement programs are between 5–15%

Context: Busy multi-site surgical hospital client with mix of Emergency and Elective procedures

• Scope: Improve patient discharge by 10am—in key hospital wards (eg. surgical, orthopaedic, rehab) to free up beds for anticipated ED admissions, and theatre
• Goal: Minimise bed-block and Emergency Department ambulance bypass hours using a ‘pull system’ to smooth patient flow
• Review on a site-by-site basis, merits of a patient discharge lounge
• Ensure high levels of patient satisfaction are maintained

Results delivered

• Front line ward staff document and implement corrective actions to improve on-time patient discharge
• Improved communication up-front with patients increases carer and patient satisfaction
• Discharge lounge implemented at 1 of 5 hospitals
• Our KPI results for patient discharge by 10am often achieve >50% improvement

Context: Public Hospital project experience

• Scope: a) Reduce waste and improve cost efficiencies in non-clinical areas (eg. food, and ward inventories)
• Scope: b) Reduce number of unnecessary diagnostic tests (eg. tests ordered prior to patient discharge but never reviewed)
• Scope: c) Reduce wastage of high cost pharmaceuticals (eg. shelf life expires before use)

Results delivered

• Reductions in high-cost pharmaceuticals and pharmacy inventory 5–20%
• Decrease in unused and duplication of diagnostic tests typically 10–25%
• Decrease in food wastage by typically 10–20%
• Stores and ward inventory reductions of 15–25%

Context: 24 month program to roll-out visual performance monitoring to front line hospital staff

• Scope: many change programs lack the ‘hard-wiring’ of KPIs from Board room to front line teams. However, during this successful client engagement, Medteryx worked with multiple hospital sites and front line teams (clinical and non-clinical) to tightly link Group strategy with day-to-day improvement tasks and to upskill the organisation in visual reporting techniques
• Clinicians mandated a ‘balanced score card’ approach focusing on Quality, Patient Satisfaction, and Capacity improvement
• Dirty data were common and required error reporting scripts and staff training to correct
• Skills training was required for front line team members around principles of continuous improvement, importance of fact based analysis, and delivering value for money outcomes.

Results delivered

• Sustained frontline engagement evidenced by team members owning and plotting their own results for each KPI on a daily basis
• Hospital management reporting system updated so that each KPI takes no longer than 2 minutes to chart on a daily basis -eg by theatre tech or ward clerk
• Buy-in and ownership by front line staff in change program to achieve ‘service excellence’
• Broad based improvement across a range of KPIs between 5% to 50%.