Stewardship

The healthcare industry is facing unprecedented growth and change in Australia and around the world. St John of God Health Care is not immune and in response we have developed a transformational capability, much of which requires the uptake of new technology that will better inform our delivery of high quality healthcare.

We are delivering complex, impactful, high value programs of work that contribute to the achievement of Our Strategic Priorities 2015 – 2019.

The programs focus on service quality, caregiver satisfaction, the operational performance of our services and our reputation as a recognised leader in the Australian health sector.

In response to strategic priority two: To significantly increase our investment in information, analytics and technology, the announcement was made in February to appoint a transformational leader for the Information Services function to establish a new Information Services operating model.

Procedural Areas Transformation Program 

This program will deliver innovative changes within procedural areas at St John of God Subiaco and Murdoch Hospitals.

The program is delivering St John of God Health Care’s first Clinical Command Centre at St John of God Murdoch Hospital, providing a central hub to coordinate and streamline activities within theatres to improve performance and experience for patients, doctors and caregivers. A second Clinical Command Centre will be implemented at St John of God Subiaco Hospital in the second half of 2017.

An online admissions system that streamlines patient interactions with our hospitals will improve patient experience by reducing the number of forms and visits required before attending a hospital for treatment.

Surgical preference cards that set out the required supplies for each procedure based on the surgeon’s requirements are being digitised, allowing more accurate and reliable preparation for procedures and improvement in stock management.

A mobile app, currently under development, will provide pathology and radiology results, operating list details and patient locations, thereby improving clinicians’ access to patient information.

Business Analytics and Reporting Transformation Program (BART)

Program BART is focused on improving the way St John of God Health Care utilises data and information. Our vision is to create a culture where data and information is routinely used to provide insight and foresight, leading to significantly improved decision-making and outcomes for our patients.

Achieving this will require establishment of a new business analytics function, introduction of new technologies, a data governance framework, a data-driven culture and a suite of key performance indicators to measure and benchmark the organisation’s performance.

Initiatives already implemented include Tableau Server to support a more visual display of data and a finalised suite of executive key performance indicators, measuring culture, service and stewardship with a shift toward patient outcome measures.

Project Camillus

Project Camillus focuses on the implementation of a rostering, time and attendance system across all Australian services.

The vision for the project is to create a sustainable workforce that is empowered with the tools to deliver both effective and efficient high quality care capable of meeting future demands and expectations.

Two streams of work – rostering, and payroll, time and attendance – are focused on preparing for a successful group-wide implementation.

Caregiver Net Promoter Score (Caregiver NPS)

Net promoter score (NPS) is a quick and easy satisfaction survey method that asks participants to rate, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely it is that they would recommend something to their friends and family.

We routinely use this method for our caregiver, specialist and patient satisfaction surveys to assess our performance and impact of our initiatives to determine where improvements can be made.

St John of God Subiaco and Murdoch Hospitals now issue NPS satisfaction surveys to caregivers, specialists and patients via SMS technology, reaching groups who do not have computer access. This facilitates timely feedback that enables improvements to be enacted on a more regular basis. NPS satisfaction surveys for patients will be rolled out more broadly across the group in 2017-18.

Discharge Summary App

Currently live at St John of God Bunbury Hospital, the discharge summary web app was developed to allow the hospital to send high quality discharge summaries to general practitioners and to the patients’ online MyHealth Records.

Coders are able to easily code patient billing from digital records instead of hand written documents and have visibility over discharge summaries requiring follow-up and clinician approval for billing to commence. St John of God Bunbury Hospital has processed 1,416 discharge summaries since the app went live in September 2016.

Compliance Notification for caregivers

A web app has been developed through a partnership between Human Resources and the Information Services Business Intelligence teams to notify and remind caregivers when their mandatory compliance requirements, such as Working with Children, Nurse and Midwifery Registration, need renewal.

Enterprise Data Warehouse

The development and implementation of an Enterprise Data Warehouse has created a central data repository from a number of core applications and disparate systems allowing a wide range of visualisation tools to surface our corporate data from a single source of truth. It is a necessary first step to leverage data and analytics capabilities in order to deliver better care for our patients.

Enterprise Monitoring Command

The enterprise monitoring command system allows us to view the status of all of our core information services infrastructure and applications on a single dashboard. It provides automated incident creation and alerting, via SMS notifications to information services support teams in the event of critical service failures.

Before the introduction of this platform, we relied on caregivers to report incidents, which delayed resolution, particularly for issues arising after hours. With this new system in place, we are often in a position to rectify incidents before caregivers know they have occurred.

Cybersecurity

Over the past 12 months, the organisation has improved its readiness for cyberattack. In adopting a framework from the Centre for Internet Security, we identified a number of opportunities to enhance our protection. As part of that process, we recently underwent an assessment of our information technology infrastructure maturity, conducted by Cisco. St John of God Health Care ranked first in cybersecurity preparedness for healthcare in Australia and New Zealand and in the top quartile for our technological maturity overall.