Meet the Best Health Project Award finalists in the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards

The concept of combining digital technology and personal health enablement underpins the thinking of each of the projects in the health category of the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards.

Whilst the systems designed by the three finalists were part of community-wide digital investments, they all align on the fundamental objective of bringing innovation in health technology to the individual.

And the three finalists in the category are:

• Barwon Health for its CoVax for the South West Victoria eVaccine Management System
• Covid-19 Smart IoT Screening System Pilot at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network and University of Sydney
• eHealth NSW Patient-Reported Measures 

Barwon Health for CoVax for the South West Victoria eVaccine Management System

The Victorian town of Geelong was not only the first regional area to deploy vaccinations, but it also became the template for the rollout of the national vaccination program across southwest Victoria, Barwon Health director of information and analytics Matt Morris said.

"One of the things that we needed to be able to do was to be able to manage the vaccination rollout both from a clinical and administrative component, and actually thirdly, from supply and demand on the weeks that vaccination was to commence."

One of the immediate problems that the team found was that there was no clinical system available from the department for all health services to use.

Rather than using a paper-based system, which would create clinical risk and make it hard to track the volume of immunisations being performed, the decision was taken to deliver an electronic vaccination management system.

"To be able to manage our operations, we wanted to make sure that we could actually overlay an information governance structure across the whole region," Morris said.

"This system was to be implemented across 14 health services and over 50 sites across all of Southwest Victoria."

Covid-19 Smart IoT Screening System Pilot at Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network

When Covid-19 broke out, there was an immediate and urgent need to reduce transmission risks across healthcare facilities.

Sydney Children's Hospital Network used an IoT healthcare innovation co-designed by a cross-disciplinary team.

"There was a need to ensure that we kept health institutions around the state, and the families and their patients that visited those health institutions, safe," Sydney Children's Hospital Network CIO Michael Dickinson said.

"That was the main reason why we why created this app."

The result is a custom smartphone screening app, added Dr Audrey P Wang, group lead, digital health innovation(collaborative) Lab, University of Sydney.

"It's got three different physical interfaces within that whole system. We have a physical e-gate, a QR code reader and a temperature sensor. We integrate within the app, [the] evidence-based Covid-19 screening questions, and if it's all okay, the validation occurs and the e-gate opens and allows that person to come in to visit their loved one or work for that day."

eHealth NSW Patient Reported Measures

The NSW government's Patient Reported Measures enables patients to provide direct and timely feedback to medical staff, allowing data to be part of their medical treatment.

This information creates a new conversation with clinicians focused on what matters most to the patient, according to Natasha Beach, portfolio director, integrated care and population health, program delivery at eHealth NSW.

"The team have built it and operationalised and productionised the whole platform and system within 10 months from initial kickoff. It went live in the Illawarra Shoalhaven local health district in February last year."

It is now used in more than 245 locations across 15 NSW Health districts, speciality health networks two primary care locations, she told iTnews.

While Patient-Reported Measures surveys have existed for decades, they have been used primarily for research purposes in the past.

"We never had a singular statewide solution that enabled that real-time feedback of survey results to our clinicians. And the real-time feedback is critical because that is the value-added for our clinical teams and patients. Clinicians are focusing the conversation away from what's the matter with you, to what matters to you, " said Melissa Tinsley, associate director, integrated digital enablement accelerator.

Watch the mini-documentary series

Thank you to every organisation that entered the Best Health Project Award category. 

Watch the rest of the mini-documentaries about the 2022 iTnews Benchmark Awards finalists’ projects here.

On June 15, the award winners will be announced at a ceremony and dinner hosted by KPMG in Barangaroo, Sydney.