A local industry placement internship with Health Translation SA and Digital Health SA has delivered a critical step towards improving continuity of care through real-time data sharing between community and hospital healthcare providers. 

Health Translation SA’s Connected Care project began in 2019, and was supported by the Australian Government’s Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) as part of the Rapid Applied Research Translation program. (MRF9100005).   Critical leadership for the Connected Care Project has been provided by partner organisations including SA Health’s Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer (OCMIO), the Commission on Excellence and Innovation in Health (CEIH), the University of South Australia, Adelaide Primary Health Network, and the Country SA PHN.

The project aims to address the long-established problem of discontinuity of care, wherein critical details relating to a patient are lost in the transition between primary care and hospital care settings. These two disparate healthcare settings use very different data systems and without significant effort from clinicians and administrative staff it can be nearly impossible for up-to-date, accurate patient records to be shared across the sector. 

This means that critical details about patient management and treatment can be lost, valuable time is lost trying to chase information, and diagnostic tests are often unnecessarily repeated. Such discontinuity in the transition between primary and acute care leads to poorer outcomes for patients and is even associated with a higher risk of extended hospitalisation or death. 

A solution is urgently needed to bridge this gap and ensure continuity of care throughout the patient journey, but navigating a complex healthcare system to create an effective solution is no mean feat and requires an enormous team effort. 

During his six-month internship, which was coordinated through the Australian Postgraduate Research Intern (APR.intern) program, Swinburne University of Technology PhD student Dominic Lin completed a critical step in this project, bringing us closer to the creation of a technical data sharing solution that could interconnect the primary and acute healthcare settings. 

“Health Translation SA had already conducted the early phases of this project, including significant engagement with practitioners and consumers in the healthcare system to understand their needs,” Dominic explained.

“My primary goal during this phase of the project was to deliver a comprehensive draft of the business and technical requirements of an effective data exchange solution to this problem, and actually identify potential technical solutions in partnership with Digital Health SA.”

To do this, Dominic researched the technical operations of SA Health’s data storage and exchange capabilities and compared these with the capabilities of the primary care operators. With support from senior colleagues at Digital Health SA, he investigated the high-level system architecture of each system to characterise their compatibility and identified potential bridges between the primary and acute care settings. The end result of this important work was a comprehensive report containing the technical details needed to consider potential solutions to this continuity of care problem.

“With the work that Dom’s done, we’ve ended up with very detailed and tangible documentation around what the requirements are for both functional and non-functional components of this solution,” said Rhys Parker, Chief Clinical Information Officer at Digital Health SA.

“A real big-ticket item for health is that ability to interconnect primary care and acute care settings and be able to manage that patient journey end to end.”

Dominic’s internship not only highlighted the importance of data sharing across healthcare settings, but also highlighted how essential the relationships between the partner organisations are to pushing this work forward. 

“We appreciate what the internship program does. We like the model of it and we like what it does from a capacity-building perspective,” said Wendy Keech, CEO of Health Translation SA.

“The strong partnership between HTSA and Digital Health SA, as well as the Office of the Chief Medical Information Officer is absolutely critical to getting this work done, and we could not do it without the support of all the passionate individuals who have worked on this project.”

The successful outcome from this internship also speaks to the effectiveness of the APR.intern program, with National Program Manager Glen Sheldon adding,

“This is a fantastic internship result where there’s been work on a real problem that everyone’s really interested in the solution for.”

At the conclusion of his internship, Dominic was grateful for the opportunity to flex his technical skills, and to have built new skills in an unfamiliar industry.

“Throughout the six-month internship I learned many things from my industry mentors,” he said.

“They perfectly demonstrated how to drive a research project forward to become a product, and they linked me with different key people for the project and demonstrated how to effectively communicate with different levels of people,”

“These soft skills are extremely beneficial for my future.”

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