The term E-health is a recent healthcare practice option supported by electronic communication and processes and dates back to 1999. Although the term is often interchangeably used with health informatics, it generally refers to the practice of healthcare with the use of internet. This umbrella term often encompasses electronic health record, clinical decision support systems, computerised physician order entries, telemedicine, e-prescribing, consumer health informatics, and medical research with the use of grids (Kontos et al., 2014). NSW health has been identified to deliver world class person-centred healthcare that is digitally enabled for all people of NSW. It takes essential steps for incorporating the latest health technology advances and ICT infrastructure, with the aim of delivering integrated accessible and high quality healthcare (NSW Ministry of Health, 2014). The E-health strategy of NSW comprises of using digital technology for transforming the way it delivers healthcare to all patients, and takes into account the recent advances, policy directions, and ongoing enhancement, for ensuring quality safety and performance of the health system. E-health will help in reducing staff stress, make an accessible and efficient patient record, and reduce the indirect work (Mohr et al., 2014). Moreover the procedure is time saving and also guarantees best outcome for patient care. This report will analyse the NSW health state plan that aims to digitalise healthcare.
Typically E-health applications have the role of using the internet for transmitting and storing patient data that can be used either by a provider or buy a service user. Digitalization of the health care service by NSW will be achieved by utilisation of services and software that allow to transmit, manage, record or store information, record keeping or payment. The three E-health priorities as identified in the strategic plan are namely, (1) building consistent foundation, (2) integration, and (3) personalization. Thus, NSW health will help in delivering integrated and digitally enabled healthcare services to all clients (NSW Ministry of Health, 2016). The system will focus on building the already existing processes in a way that the patients are provided the opportunity to consistently interact with service providers, regardless of the region where they are located. This priority will take into account service development code, digital systems and network, and infrastructures standards that will allow all service users to have access to appropriate healthcare information, thus enabling clinical decision making process.
Figure 2- NSW Health Priorities
Source- (NSW Ministry of Health, 2016)
The second priority of integration focuses on delivering a continuum of care that will be able to respond to all preferences and demands of the service users, across community, primary, and hospital settings (NSW Ministry of Health, 2014). Digitalization of healthcare service will provide benefits to the patient and foster partnership with the providers, thereby delivering integrated services. The third priority of personalization emphasizes on tailoring the services in response to the needs of the patient that will allow them to play the role of active participants in decision making and enhancing their wellbeing. An analysis of the priorities suggests that the NSW plan will be beneficial for all patients in the long-run due to the advantages that E-health will provide such as, increased safety, improved communication, reduced hospitalisation, enhanced medication management, and access to electronic media (Bergmo, 2015).
Figure 3- Key initiatives
Source- (NSW Ministry of Health, 2016)
Upon analysing the E-health strategy it can be suggested that NSW should focus more on allocating resources for digitalizing healthcare services across the state. This can be attributed to the fact that spending resources on this emerging field of medical informatics will effectively help in tackling the prevalence and spread of infectious diseases such as, tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV (Tennant et al., 2015). It will also help in meeting the long-term care demands for an aging population of the state and will improve the quality of treatment by broadening access to medical care services. Spending more resources on digitalisation of health will reduce the pressure on different public health care budget and lower the administrative burden by allowing sharing of information in a secured manner (Bergmo, 2015).
NSW can produce digital infrastructure by the effective utilisation of digital community based healthcare services such as, mobile health, health information technology, telemedicine, personalized medicine, telehealth, and wearables (Mohr et al., 2014). Digitalizing an entire hospital would take up huge amount of resources, when compared to the aforementioned strategy. 70% of the supply needs must be addressed now, and the rest 30% should be kept for future.
The digitalised healthcare services are used by healthcare professionals, patients and family carers. Owing to the growing healthcare demands that is often governed by demographic changes and a shortage of healthcare professionals, all service providers, patients, and citizens can effectively use this means for exchanging or providing information, in order to improve healthcare status, enhance person-centred care, increase equity of excess and foster cross-border healthcare (Li et al., 2013). However, citizens of the state having limited computer literacy will be unable to utilise the digitalised service efficiently, thereby not receiving quantifiable benefits (Choi & DiNitto, 2013).
One major recommendation would be to involve and interdisciplinary team in the development and enforcement of E-health services in the community. One of the prime challenges would be to ensure a sound understanding of the complexities that are associated with digitalization of health. Hence, all team members should be able to meet for discussions approvals and clarifications to get them on the same board, before the application developers are involved. The NSW should take attempts at minimising the requirement of user input into the applications for keeping them relatively simple, while delivering personalized and safe messages to all service users and providers as and when appropriate (Li et al., 2013). Digitalization of health care service will show an increased likelihood to succeed when the NSW focuses on four essential dimensions of health services such as, identifying and prioritising the essential sources of values, building service delivery capabilities, modernizing foundations, and strengthening the code management capabilities (Meier, Fitzgerald & Smith, 2013). Increasing access of patient outcome, cost-to-care data, and satisfaction scores would also help in devising a new risk sharing model with all the service providers. This should be followed by examination of the IT infrastructure of all healthcare companies that will formulate the E-health applications (Van Velsen, Wentzel & Van Gemert-Pijnen, 2013). Connectivity should also be incorporated into the IT architecture with the use of monitoring technologies and sensors, for effectively generating and managing data that are collected from the medical applications.
References:
Bergmo, T. S. (2015). How to measure costs and benefits of eHealth interventions: an overview of methods and frameworks. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(11), e254.
Choi, N. G., & DiNitto, D. M. (2013). The digital divide among low-income homebound older adults: Internet use patterns, eHealth literacy, and attitudes toward computer/Internet use. Journal of medical Internet research, 15(5), e93.
Kontos, E., Blake, K. D., Chou, W. Y. S., & Prestin, A. (2014). Predictors of eHealth usage: insights on the digital divide from the Health Information National Trends Survey 2012. Journal of medical Internet research, 16(7), e172.
Li, J., Talaei-Khoei, A., Seale, H., Ray, P., & MacIntyre, C. R. (2013). Health care provider adoption of eHealth: systematic literature review. Interactive journal of medical research, 2(1), e7.
Meier, C. A., Fitzgerald, M. C., & Smith, J. M. (2013). eHealth: extending, enhancing, and evolving health care. Annual review of biomedical engineering, 15, 359-382.
Mohr, D. C., Schueller, S. M., Montague, E., Burns, M. N., & Rashidi, P. (2014). The behavioral intervention technology model: an integrated conceptual and technological framework for eHealth and mHealth interventions. Journal of medical Internet research, 16(6), e146.
NSW Ministry of Health. (2014). NSW STATE HEALTH PLAN TOWARDS 2021. Retrieved from https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/statehealthplan/Publications/NSW-State-Health-Plan-Towards-2021.pdf.
NSW Ministry of Health. (2016). eHealth Strategy for NSW Health 2016-2026. Retrieved from https://www.health.nsw.gov.au/ehealth/documents/ehealth-strategy-for-nsw-health-2016-2026.pdf.
Tennant, B., Stellefson, M., Dodd, V., Chaney, B., Chaney, D., Paige, S., & Alber, J. (2015). eHealth literacy and Web 2.0 health information seeking behaviors among baby boomers and older adults. Journal of medical Internet research, 17(3), e70.
Van Velsen, L., Wentzel, J., & Van Gemert-Pijnen, J. E. (2013). Designing eHealth that matters via a multidisciplinary requirements development approach. JMIR research protocols, 2(1), e21.
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