Hospitals in Victoria's South West, including public health agencies under the South West Alliance of Rural Health and Barwon Health in Geelong, are set to roll out a data platform capable of real-time analysis using AI, machine learning, as well as business and clinical intelligence.

WHAT IT DOES

The health organisations will be deploying the IRIS for Health platform by global tech provider InterSystems. The data platform, according to InterSystems's website, is specifically engineered to extract value from healthcare data. 

It is a standards-based platform that is able to read and write Health Level 7's Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR) for developing healthcare applications.

It is also capable of ingesting, processing and storing transaction data "at high rates" while simultaneously processing high volume analytic workloads involving historical and real-time data.

WHY IT MATTERS

While the health providers have interconnected systems, including clinical and patient administration systems, specialist healthcare applications and data analytics solutions, they don't have a single data repository supporting real-time data analysis. 

To this end, SWARH and Barwon Heath have tapped InterSystems for its IRIS for Health platform that, according to a press statement, will be used to "simplify and accelerate the process of extracting value from or operationalising healthcare data" in real-time, as well as to "improve the consistency and reliability" of healthcare information.

For example, IRIS for Health will enable SWARH to identify in real-time which facility is likely to provide the best outcome for a particular patient. 

"IRIS for Health enables the organisations to capture and persist the data from HL7 and other messages to create a real-time health data lake or repository," InterSystems said.

Ultimately, the data solution will help "improve clinical outcomes and patient experience and optimise the use of resources" for them.

InterSystems also noted that its platform will support the health organisations' interoperability and healthcare device integration capabilities, including API management and deep support for emerging data standards in healthcare such as FHIR.

Additionally, InterSystems's data platform will enable SWARH and Barwon Health to use AI for better population health as well as the "Hospital of Things", which will see the integration and analysis of data from health devices used within and outside hospitals and data from the external population.

THE LARGER TREND

Providing real-time data is also the aim of a new project in Victoria. Last week, the Australian government-backed Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre announced the A$2.1 million dashboards project that will provide regional hospitals with live feeds of clinical analytics and reporting information drawn from Eastern Health's electronic medical records and the Victorian Health Incident Management System.

ON THE RECORD

"IRIS for Health will enable us to consolidate all our healthcare data into a single repository for analysis and operationalisation. It enables, for example, machine learning models to be trained on historical data capture across the whole region. That underpins our innovation strategy to extract value from healthcare data to provide the best possible care and ensure the long-term sustainability of our operations," said SWARH CIO Andrew MacFarlane. 

"Organisations need clean, accurate data available anytime, anywhere. It needs to be able to flow seamlessly across all sources, be ready for action and enable better decisions. That is what we call healthy data," Darren Jones, InterSystems country manager for Australia and New Zealand, also commented.