Last week this press release arrived:
Media Invitation - Launch of Improvement Foundation’s New Patient Data Platform powered by Telstra Health
Wednesday, August 31st, 2016 - Improvement Foundation
Australian health services are now able to obtain real time health data from disparate primary and secondary healthcare software systems, transforming the way that data is collected and accessed from medical software systems.
The Improvement Foundation, Australia’s leading provider of quality improvement solutions for the healthcare sector, have joined forces with Telstra Health, Australia’s biggest digital health company, to release Elicio.
Rather than having to rely on traditional data extraction software to extract and analyse data from medical software systems, Elicio will directly collect and aggregate real time data from general practices, hospitals, pharmacies, radiology and aged care software systems, providing clinicians with a view of their patients’ health journey beyond their own health service.
With increasingly complex population health needs, Elicio will keep doctors in general practices and hospitals at the forefront in delivering best practice in patient centred care. Additionally with the use of the Improvement Foundation’s extensive collection of quality and safety data sets, clinicians can assess and benchmark their performance and reporting of all major diseases across the primary and secondary health care sector using real time data.
“This is a major step forward in providing a real solution for a range of service providers including regional health authorities as well as private health groups. This is a wonderful opportunity to make a real difference in how care is delivered and managed for the benefit of providers and patients. It is a cost effective and agile solution that provides an integrated solution for the often fragmented health system.”, said David Wright, Chair, Improvement Foundation.
Elicio will be available through the Improvement Foundation. Further information is available on the Improvement Foundation website at www.improve.org.au/elicio
Media are invited to attend the launch of Elicio.
Here is the link:
I went to the website to find out some more:
Elicio – Improve Healthcare Delivery with Integrated Data
The New Data Intelligence Platform that Transforms the Way Data is used across the Healthcare System
Integrate data – access real time aggregated health data from a range of clinical software sources across the health system to deliver best practice care
Effective care management – easily identify gaps in care and drive improvements in coordination of care leading to enhanced patient outcomes and satisfaction
Improve efficiencies – streamline and improve care delivery using accurate data
Effective care management – easily identify gaps in care and drive improvements in coordination of care leading to enhanced patient outcomes and satisfaction
Improve efficiencies – streamline and improve care delivery using accurate data
Delivering best quality outcomes is a challenge when health data is siloed among different systems and sectors. Elicio can reliably and securely integrate data from across the health system to effectively track patients’ health journeys while maintaining privacy standards. With increasingly complex population health needs, Elicio keeps you at the forefront in delivering best practice in patient-centred care.
Transforming Access to Healthcare Data
Gain valuable insights with real time, accurate information from a wide range of medical settings – general practices, hospitals, pharmacies, health specialists – making it easy to identify performance gaps, both regionally and nationally and providing quality data that supports commissioning. Utilise structured data sets to reveal health and behaviour patterns and transform services with improvement initiatives to enhance patient outcomes.
Elicio is the bridge that successfully unites patients and their health professionals for an integrated and cost effective health system. Elicio captures and provides extensive, reliable data on quality and safety measures. This leading edge system with its automated data collection means that the turnaround time for analysing quality data is immediate.
Flexible and Scalable
Elicio is a flexible and scalable platform that can aggregate data from organisational level through to state and national. You can customise settings for tailored information that matches your reporting needs.
Being agile and flexible ensures that measurement data sets can be easily added to cater for specific quality improvement needs. With user friendly tools for monitoring performance measures, Elicio provides you with graphs and easy-to-interpret results that will help improve the cost and quality of health care. Set goals, monitor progress and benchmark data to improve the efficiency, accuracy and performance of your systems.
Improve Efficiency, Accuracy and Performance
Gather health intelligence from a vast national collection of measurement sets covering quality and safety of chronic diseases. Benchmark your performance using consistent measurements sets and compare results against local and national averages. With Elicio you can:
• Analyse and benchmark data to identify target areas for improvement
• Monitor improvements over time covering a range of clinical areas
• Compare and benchmark multiple performance indicators against local, regional and national aggregated data
• Set goals and monitor progress
• Gain a comprehensive understanding of the quality and safety of healthcare delivered in your region.
• Analyse and benchmark data to identify target areas for improvement
• Monitor improvements over time covering a range of clinical areas
• Compare and benchmark multiple performance indicators against local, regional and national aggregated data
• Set goals and monitor progress
• Gain a comprehensive understanding of the quality and safety of healthcare delivered in your region.
Reduce Costs
Elicio is interoperable with leading primary and secondary healthcare software. All aggregated data is securely hosted within the Improvement Foundation portal, which is monitored and managed by specialist IT personnel. We have over ten years of experience in securely managing data and we’re committed to protecting your privacy in line the latest Australian Privacy regulations. Requiring minimal IT support, you can allocate unique security access levels for different teams and individuals in your organisation.
Elicio is powered by Telstra Health’s health intelligence platform and managed and maintained by the Improvement Foundation.
Here is the link:
I was interested to note that a claim to fame for the organisation was the following after being involved with NEHTA and the PCEHR:
Our Results
Practices and health services in this program achieved outstanding results that included:
· Uploading of 37% of all shared health records
· Registered 4,511 patients to the PCEHR
· Uploaded 1,708 shared health summaries to the system.
See here:
Having read all this above carefully I have to say I have no idea just who is doing what with whom in all this. It would be useful to see some examples of the outcomes of the work and some details of just what is being done before making any commitment to it and its plans.
Browsing the case studies I found it hard to find much in the way of metrics – which I would expect in an improvement entity that has been operating for over a decade.
En passant I noticed this:
Elicio - Meaning of Elicio
What does Elicio mean?
Elicio's origin is Latin, and its use, Italian. It is derived literally from the word elicio which is of the meaning 'to entice out, to draw down'. Elicius (Latin) is an older form of the name. In Roman mythology, this was the title of the king of the gods, Jupiter, in reference to how his lightning bolt can be drawn down to Earth.
I will leave it to others to explain what all that means! I look forward to some clarity about just what Elicio is all about etc.... There are some aspects of this that make one wonder just how individual privacy is handled and just how secure what is being done is? I also look forward to some insiders explaining the scope, mechanisms and intent of all this.
David.
This looks like a huge step forward for eHealth. TELSTRA HEALTH's support of the Improvement Foundation has obviously been invaluable in helping IF realise its objectives. It will be interesting to hear Telstra's Head of Health expand on its involvement with Elicio.
ReplyDeleteAs a system architect there are a couple of points I would be curious about. Starting from the end of the data flow:
ReplyDelete1. Presenting information in a meaningful way is a discipline in itself. It is an understood problem and the technology is standard, but it requires deep insights into what IS meaningful to the information consumers - which can be dependent on context. In short, a lot of work involved in this stage, but not new.
2. Real-time analysis of data. This is a growth area over the last few years and has some interesting challenges. Most analytics runs over data collected over a day or more and so you have time to make sure it is complete and clean. We recently provided live analytics for the Tour de France and that was not straightforward.
3. Matching records from multiple, disparate sources, each of which will have its own patient ID, details, format etc. There are a number of interesting technologies involved here, from data enrichment to machine learning involved and heuristics. Much easier if the machines supplying data are all speaking the same language, that is, if you can assume HL7 and the NEHTA standards are followed - a BIG assumption.
4. The kicker to me is the implication that all the involved systems can even share data in real-time at all. Older systems are not designed to network or still operate on daily batch jobs. Many of the recent problems in hospital IT systems can be tracked back to problems in inter-operability. If you can't get the EHR to talk to the critical care systems at one location, you've got buckley's chance of combining results across the whole state.
Of course, this is all general technical aspects, ignoring the special circumstances of medical data, such as privacy and failure modes.