CIO Interview: An agile approach to innovation

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Picture: Pegasus Health chief information officer Warwick Hutchins

Guest column by Warwick Hutchins, Pegasus Health chief information officer

With privacy and security of patient data critical, innovative thinking and experimentation needs to go beyond the ‘fail fast, fail often’ maxim.

Having recently joined the health sector from corporate and iwi organisations, I believe that our future innovation will depend on somehow adopting a more agile approach.

Acknowledging the increasing need for innovation in healthcare, we’re wrestling with how we best support innovative thinking and experimentation. Many grassroots ideas are difficult to test or pilot due to the (appropriate) constraints around the privacy and security of patient data.

In these cases, the popular agile maxim of “fail fast, fail often” simply isn’t an option. We can help with expertise and infrastructure but security compliance costs can quickly kill the pilot of a new idea.

Our digital journey

While we try to make it easier and faster to iterate through new ideas, we’re also focusing on encouraging local collaboration between health organisations. This includes vendors, where we work together to agree interoperability and system standards that can benefit the sector.

Our future digital journey will be based on continuity of care for patients, focusing on improving equitable healthcare access for the people of Canterbury.

One of the key challenges facing primary healthcare is the rapidly changing nature of patient engagement. As well as having more ready access to a huge pool of medical information (Dr Google), the adoption of digital technology generally is shifting expectations for primary care.

In our role, we need to ensure primary care has the right tools today but can also thrive in future models of care, such as Health Care Home. To do this we have a strong focus on clinician engagement and patient outcomes.

Our tools

One of our goals has been to support continuity of patient care by enabling cross-platform systems. The HealthOne platform is a secure Shared Care Record View that holds the GP record, prescribed medication and test results.

HealthOne can provide life-saving patient information when administering emergency care. It also aids in ensuring clinicians have up-to-date patient medications for appropriate treatment and prevention of adverse reactions.

Combined with the Canterbury District Health Board Health Connect South platform, it provides a patient-centric view across both primary and secondary care. It is available all across the South Island to GPs, community nurses, pharmacists and hospital doctors.

One of the key principles behind such a powerful tool is the suitable care of the records it contains.

Since its inception, HealthOne has been based on a strict privacy framework. It is also one of the few such systems in the world that undertakes proactive monitoring of access to its data.

That means every access to a record is logged and automatically compared against certain criteria to ensure the person accessing it is involved in the patient’s care. It’s a powerful way of preserving confidence in patient privacy while providing broad access to health practitioners to improve patient care.

Pegasus also manages the regional Electronic Referral Messaging System platform. Rather than providing broad access to care records, ERMS manages the electronic referral process from primary to secondary care according to Regional HealthPathway principles.

The benefit is twofold: a faster and more reliable delivery of referrals and a user-friendly way of ensuring referrals meet mutually agreed requirements.

Pegasus Health

Pegasus Health is a primary care network and primary health organisation providing services and support to general practices and community-based health providers within Canterbury to deliver quality healthcare to more than 400,000 enrolled patients.

Formed in 1992 through a commitment to improve the health outcomes of the people in the community, Pegasus has become an integral part of the primary care network in the region.

Warwick Hutchins is the chief information officer for Pegasus Health

If you want to contact eHealthNews.nz regarding this View, please email the editor Rebecca McBeth.

Read more CIO Interviews:

Stuart Bloomfield: What does it mean to be a change-fit organisation?

Tony Carpinter: A digital journey from vein to vein

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