South Metropolitan Health Service in Western Australia started digitising its pre-surgery program three years after its launch. 

It recently awarded a tender to Personify Care to provide, host, and deliver ongoing support to a SaaS application that will underpin its LifeFit-SurgFit Program. "The solution will allow patients to complete patient health questionnaires and assist them throughout their surgical journey. The aim is for the solution to enable patients to be fit for surgery and fit for life through early screening and targeted patient pathways," the tender read. 

WHY IT MATTERS

SMHS, which provides hospital and community-based public health care services in southern metropolitan Perth, started the LifeFit SurgFit in 2020-2021 as a "holistic approach" to preparing patients for surgery. 

"Patients are supported through their surgical journey by a multidisciplinary team providing health and wellbeing tools for people to integrate into their lifestyle in the lead-up surgery, including education through a dedicated SurgFit school," a spokesperson for the organisation explained to Healthcare IT News.

The program was first offered to ENT head and neck surgery patients and later extended to upper gastrointestinal and colorectal surgery patients. It was initially implemented without a digital platform. 

THE LARGER TREND

SMHS chose to go with Personify Care's digital solution ​​partly due to its "track record in delivering prehabilitation, pre-surgical and post-discharge pathways across other Australian tertiary public health services," the spokesperson shared. Most recently, the tech company helped deliver the surgical pre-rehabilitation programme called My Prehab at Central Adelaide Local Health Network

In all digitisation projects, cybersecurity is a big consideration. Late last year, the digital pathways provided by Personify Care to CALHN and Southern Adelaide Local Health Network got hit by a cyber attack, resulting in the deletion of a folder containing the health information of 121 patients. Forensic analysis still cannot determine the reason behind the hack. 

As far as SMHS is concerned, Personify Care's platform still met its cybersecurity requirements during a proof of concept demonstration. Additionally, it was recently certified with ISO 27001:2022, the highest level of certification for enterprise information security. 

Once validated in the LifeFit SurgFit program, the spokesperson mentioned that their use of Personify Care's platform may be extended to other clinical pathways, including non-surgical ones such as endoscopy.

ON THE RECORD

"By delivering this model of care [pre-surgery service] through digital patient pathways, we will aim to increase the reach of the program to more patients across SMHS and provide the multidisciplinary team with early visibility to key clinical indicators needed to deliver targeted patient pathways," the SMHS spokesperson said.