SA Health, together with the Commission on Excellence and Innovation in Health, will start collecting and analysing patient-reported measures across South Australia through its new programme.

The Patient Reported Measures (PRM) programme will support clinical services to deliver "high-quality, patient-centred, and value-driven care" by encouraging patients to report on health outcomes and experiences. 

SA Health and CIEH have chosen digital health company The Clinician via an open tender process to help implement the programme. They will leverage the latter's ZEDOC platform, which will be integrated with SA Health's IT systems to automate the distribution, collection, and analysis of patient-reported outcomes and experience measures.

WHY IT MATTERS

According to The Clinician, the implementation of patient-generated data in clinical services will ensure that both patients and clinicians will have "all the information they need to make the best decisions together."

Patients can complete the questionnaires on their preferred devices from anywhere with clinical teams able to access real-time results within their own IT systems.

The ZEDOC platform will be rolled out in several stages at select SA Health services with an initial implementation set for the middle of 2023 and subsequent deployments over the next two years. The programme targets to enrol about a million patients and approximately 5,000 clinical staff using the system by mid-2025.

THE LARGER TREND

Two of the largest hospitals in Victoria, Cabrini Health and The Alfred, also recently adopted The Clinician's PRM technology to automate their collection and analysis of health data from colorectal cancer patients.

In late 2021, Singapore's health tech agency Integrated Health Information Systems began rolling out the ZEDOC platform across the island city-state's public health system.

Meanwhile last year, Melbourne-based Northern Health deployed a configured version of the ZEDOC platform, which replaced its old patient registration and intake platform. This came as part of the statewide expansion of the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department.

ON THE RECORD

"The introduction of real-time visibility of patient-reported measures has been proven to enhance patient and clinician partnerships through improved decision making and delivers healthcare that is driven by patient values," said CEIH PRM programme director Megan Scott.

"Leveraging our purpose-built platform and experience with large-scale PRMs deployments, we are committed to supporting South Australia on their journey towards patient-centred, outcomes-driven and value-based care delivery," The Clinician CEO and co-founder Ron Tenenbaum also commented.