CRN Verticals: Health check

Healthy partnerships

Healthcare has always been one of the most data-intensive industries. And provided programs such as the PCEHR get off the ground, those volumes are predicted to increase by orders of magnitude in Australia.

Resellers have an opportunity to help healthcare organisations upgrade their systems so as to allow for greater interoperability for data sharing and communications. Naturally the cloud has a role to play in all of this, however, none of the experts interviewed by CRN indicated that cloud solutions are high on the list of IT priorities for healthcare organisations, perhaps because of sensitivities around privacy and security in healthcare.

The big vendors all have skin in the healthcare game, with the likes of  SAP, IBM, Oracle and 3M at the top. But more genuine competition is needed to bring costs down to more acceptable levels.

Buller suggests one of the ways healthcare organisations can address this is to enter into partnerships with technology suppliers. These could be structured around things like joint research initiatives which result in vendors accruing intellectual IP.

“We see partnerships being one of the key ways in which vendors and end users can manage costs.”

Resellers also have an opportunity to develop solutions targeted at particular specialisations. For instance, the federal government has eight national health priority areas: arthritis and musculoskeletal conditions; asthma; cancer control; cardiovascular health; diabetes mellitus; injury prevention and control; mental health; and obesity.

These health categories are among a total of 50 addressed by an online service called HealthEdata, launched in August by Deloitte Australia. Delivering detailed and customised information relating to the local health landscape, its objective is to arm healthcare providers with research of unprecedented depth and quality covering things like the number of people projected to present a certain diseases at a certain time and during which periods of time.

“There are growing mountains of data out there, but they are disparate and often inaccessible to the industry as a whole,” says Lynne Pezzullo, lead partner health economics and social policy at Deloitte Australia Access Economics.

Mental health of course presents numerous unique challenges for health professionals, particularly around the need for immediate access to care as well as the quality, high-resolution sorts of video communications promised by decent telehealth systems.

Mental health advocacy groups are also especially heartened by the promise of improved mental services for patients in remote locations, especially farmers which have long been identified as a high-risk group for depression and other related problems. But no one is under any illusions as to the time, effort and investment required.

And of course for the channel, there is a wealthy of the opportunity to earn respect as trusted advisors able to help healthcare customers navigate the complexities of selecting and deploying standards-based technology solutions for better health outcomes.

Resellers servicing hospitals need to be especially mindful of the need for continuity. Unlike in the corporate world, the unexpected disruption of systems so common during major upgrades threaten lives in the health system. 

Still, errors made by healthcare professionals themselves remain one of the leading causes of death in the hospitals of developed countries including Australia. And this is something that well designed and deployed IT systems can practically address.

Nevertheless, health organisations seem to oscillate between profligacy and frugalness when it comes to IT. On the one hand they typically run over budget when it comes to major projects – be they for IT or otherwise – yet when it comes to signing off on new initiatives, negotiate aggressively on price.

Britain’s $12 billion National Programme for IT recently joined the pantheon of the world’s most egregious abuses of tax payers’ money. A Labour initiative dumped by the conservatives, it is an eerie warning for what could happen to Australia’s digital records program. Of course this would be a massive shame, not least for Australian resellers operating in the healthcare and/or data analytics space. 

Not only does personalised medicine promise to improve the accuracy of diagnoses and allow for more targeted causes of treatment – such as working out with more certainty the correct dosage of medication for a particular patient – but also in terms of developing pre-emptive as opposed to reactive approaches to managing health.

Health revolution 

Key to this exciting transition is the development of robust communications networks to support the rapid sharing of this data in person or in remote consultation. Dr Ramana Panda, founder and CEO of Queensland-based digital health specialists Telehealth Networks, says telehealth has the potential to completely revolutionise healthcare delivery in Australia.

He recalls recently conducting a three-way consultation over video link with a dermatologist in Sydney and a 75-year-old man with skin legions in his surgery on the Gold Coast.

“It normally takes 4 months to see a dermatologist specialist on the Gold Coast. With this system connected to a specialist somewhere else in Australia, they can log into the system with an iPad, laptop or whatever.”

According to Panda, many – if not most – of the doctors that have applied for the government’s telehealth subsidy have used Skype as their entry point to get on board.

While some might argue that a physician connecting to a patient over Skype is a step in the right direction, being paid the maximum $6000 government grant after conducting a consultation over the free service, in addition to receiving 150 percent of the standard Medicare rebate might seem a little excessive.

Besides, Panda stresses that Skype has serious shortcomings, especially when it comes to security, a politically and socially hot issue when it comes to anything related to digital health. 

“There are examples where security has been breached; dedicated systems have better security.”

It’s a fact which may well serve to benefit the Australian channel. After all, if there’s one thing that medicine - and society - teaches doctors and other health professionals, it’s to be risk averse.