NARRATOR: Let's look at how technology can make a difference to you, and your patients,
and how we can work together to provide better results
for clinicians, for patients, and for the whole health system.
Across South Australia, from the city to the most remote of locations,
clinicians are using technology to deliver faster diagnosis
ensuring those who need treatment get it, but also helping patient flows
so that we are only admitting people to hospital who really need to be there.
STEPHEN: In the area of renal disease, and in particular dialysis services in country South Australia,
we've got well over a hundred patients scattered over a dozen dialysis units,
many seven, eight, nine hours drive from Adelaide.
So what teleconferencing and telemedicine allows us to do is engage with those patients and the staff
treating them at a distance. So from my office here at the Royal Adelaide Hospital
I can see individual patients
I can talk to staff members and we can look at
individual patients, either as a whole person or in close-up, we can share
screens for example of results, x-rays.
And what effectively that allows us to do is deal with problems at a distance,
save the patient perhaps having to come to Adelaide and help get things happening,
and also the other way it allows us to identify issues early and set in train perhaps
investigations are either locally, or make plans for subsequent trips as they're needed.
That's the whole point of it,
is to allow patients to not drag down to Adelaide.
The idea of someone driving for seven or eight hours to Adelaide to sit
and see me for 20 minutes, and then turning around to drive seven, eight hours to go home is just silly
if we can deal with the issues over video conferencing.
DENNIS: Well I was playing cards when I had the stroke.
We finished playing cards at midnight, I went to walk out the door, and that was it.
Next thing, I woke up in hospital.
NARRATOR: Often the specialists are not located in the local area, so they need to be sourced in Adelaide, which is where telehealth can assist.
ZOE: So the nurse is there to support the client through the telehealth assessment
and I'm on the other end and we can receive through
interpretation of those assessments done with the nurse
DENNIS: Chatting to Zoe over the telehealth was just like talking to somebody across the table from me,
There was no stress,
It was just like a normal conversation with another person,
so just made you feel at ease.
ZOE: Being able to access the clinic via telehealth allows the clients to access specialist assessments in a timely way
They're not having to incur the costs of the stress associated with travel or being away from home
If we don't have that teleconference down here,
would have meant that I had to go travel to Adelaide, make an appointment,
family would've had to come there, have to get accommodation,
and it would have been astronomical.
Just too much stress.
NARRATOR: The latest developments of tablet based home services
such as tele-monitoring and home-based tele-rehab
along with advancements in point of care testing is changing and improving lives.
PHILIP: We use a unique combination of blood tests at the point of care,
which we call point of care pathology, with digitally based ECG's to provide the essential information
to determine whether a patient is at high risk of having a heart attack or complications.
NARRATOR: For patients who live in country areas who experience chest pain and potential heart attack,
time is really of the essence in accessing care.
Traditionally, patients in country areas have been at a significant disadvantage,
and the mortality rate has been about 1.7 times that of the city.
Using a combination of point of care testing,
sophisticated doctors paging, and specialist advice,
we've been able to close that differential in terms of their heart attack outcomes.
PHILIP: The unique thing about the point of care systems that we've developed in South Australia
is their integration right into the clinical coalface in our country hospitals
whereby we train our nursing staff to be able to do the tests and we provide the best available instruments,
and we're able to provide quality assurance so that both the local GP
and the treating specialist remotely have great confidence in the results that are obtained
in very short timeframes
TIM: One of the great benefits of the telehealth is that we can provide specialist expertise
to everyone in the whole state, rather than just people in metro Adelaide.
It's well demonstrated that if you have an expert assessing a stroke patient,
the decision about treating or not treating is made much quicker.
We are on call 24 hours of every day, and we have telehealth links to nearly every hospital in the state
This way we can have a look at the patient directly in determine
"are they the sort of patient that needs to be retrieved" or "are they the sort of patient that can stay in the country town"?
Each minute in stroke, 1.9 million brain cells are lost,
so if we make these decisions faster and treat patients quicker, we can save millions of their brain cells.
This means that people can get back to work, they can get back to their hobbies, they can care for their families;
we reduce the burden on society, and reduce the disability for these patients long term.
ANDREW: Technology's integral for how we do our work. The ability to send a retrieval team takes time,
it takes an asset like a helicopter or a fixed-wing plane. All of that takes time to get going.
We want to be able to give advice, and clinical advice to the right people in the right time frame.
Using such things as video conferencing allows us to link up immediately,
see the patient, know what we're dealing with, and give the answers to the clinicians who are looking after the patients
in a very short time frame.
The picture paints a thousand words.
It's probably the best way to put it, and if you're listening on the telephone line, you don't sometimes understand
what kind of severity you're dealing with with the patient.
By seeing the patient on the screen, that just gives us that understanding of what needs to happen
and when it needs to happen.
NARRATOR: An example of how the system has helped is in the case of Stuart,
a farmer who sustained burns injuries on a property near Maitland.
STUART: I had a farming accident on the 4th of April last year, west of Maitland,
on a friend's property helping burn canola rows.
We were bouncing along, I was just holding it dripping out flames and
next thing all I had was the handle in my hand, and it actually snapped, and the whole cannister, we'd just filled it up,
hit the ground as I jumped off the trailer the wheel ran over it,
andquirted me head to toe full of fuel.
So, yeah, I was alight within about a second.
And yeah, it burnt from the bottom up
Maitland Hospital was really good,
but they didn't have the facilities, they only had enough to sustain me,
and get me pain relief, and dress my dressings, because they were swelling up with fluid at the time, and then
the Royal Flying Doctors air evacuated me out of Maitland Airport
to Adelaide, to the Adelaide Airport, then the ambulance to the Royal Adelaide to the burns unit,
and that night I was in the theatre, and I don't remember much until I woke up the next morning
I'm pretty lucky to be alive and I went back to Maitland Hospital in Yorke Peninsula
and the staff there we'd organised before me going home
to talk to me about it and about telehealth and we're doing that
every day with my dressings as well
because we're using silver dressings to keep the infection out, and it was easy, we just organised by a date,
and I'd go with my wife shopping and telehealth would be on this time a huge big TV,
we could see them they could see us and
I could turn around, they could zoom in on my burns and check out how they're all healing,
the colour of the actual scabbing on it, see how the skin was healing.
NARRATOR: We are seeing amazing results from all over the state.
There are more than 60 public hospitals spread across South Australia.
We need to be smarter about how we deliver our services.
SA Health has already made huge improvements to patient care
by using technology to make one-on-one contact.
We need to look at how we can build on, and expand our existing technology based services,
as well as explore new opportunities to leverage the great advances being made in IT.
New technologies continue to emerge and develop every day,
both from within health, and from other unrelated industries
We are seeing examples of how new technologies can be adapted and embraced by the health system
to provide alternatives to the traditional methods of delivering care.
In Western Australia, work in the fields of augmented reality and holograms is progressing
to enhance in-home patient care.
The health care provider projects the clinician into a patient's home to speak and work with the patient,
enabling that patient to remain at home, and be cared for in their own environment,
rather than coming into hospital.
The development of robotics continues to advance .
We are seeing the use of small robots in aged care services
being used to engage the residents, getting them moving and exercising.
The use of wearables and apps for both preventative health care and early diagnosis continues to grow.
Wearables are helping consumers monitor and improve their own health status,
while capturing huge amounts of data that can be used to make decisions about their healthcare,
or even for future research.
Outside of health, the use of drones has expanded rapidly over recent years,
and we are now starting to see benefits of this in health care.
Overseas, drones are being used to deliver blood to remote locations.
Locally, delivery systems are only just beginning to emerge,
and we need to consider how we can best use this technology for the benefit of our patients.
So the challenge is there for us all.
We have come so far,
but there are endless possibilities with the technology we have,
and with the new developments that are yet to come.
How do we ensure that South Australia's health system, in both country areas and metropolitan Adelaide,
are embracing these technologies, and making the most of what they can offer us?
This is the question that we need to answer together.