South Island saves 15 years of patient travel with telehealth

eHealthNews.nz: Digital Patient

South Island saves 15 years of patient travel with telehealth

Tuesday, 7 December 2021

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Telehealth dashboard South Island DHBs have avoided more than 9 million kilometres of patient travel and more than 15 years of patient travel time by switching to telehealth for some outpatient appointments over the past year, a new interactive dashboard reveals.

By avoiding a significant amount of travel, the DHBs also avoided 2.4 million kilos of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere.

Launched in November, The South Island Regional Telehealth Dashboard was developed in collaboration with the five South Island DHBs to track progress across the South Island and support health services to connect and share resources.

The tool was modelled on a local dashboard created by Nelson Marlborough Health and pulls data from the National Non-Admitted Patient Collection (NNPAC).

(Click to enlarge)

It shows that between July 2020 to August 2021 more than 8 million minutes of patient travel time was avoided by people being able to attend hospital outpatient appointments via phone or video.

South Island Telehealth Steering Committee co-chair Claire Pennington says that’s a “phenomenal” 15.4 years and only calculates time that would have been spent in a car, so the actual time saved for patients is likely to be much higher.

Data displayed on the dashboard includes outpatient and telehealth appointment DNAs, telehealth volume, patient distance and carbon emissions avoided, patient time avoided, as well as telehealth appointments by ethnicity.

It shows that over the past year there were 286,000 outpatient appointments held across the South Island DHBs and 7.5 percent of them were via telehealth, with the vast majority done over the phone.

The August lockdown showed a huge jump in numbers up to 13,000 phone appointments that month and more than 600 via video conference. A year prior, in July 2020, there were just 6,000 phone consultations and 300 by video.

There are currently 50 users of the dashboard, including clinical champions, managers and administrators, with an aim to increase this number over time.

Wendy Laurie, South Island telehealth project manager, says the team started by releasing a Minimum Viable Product and this will have regular enhancements. The plan is to ultimately include mental health and primary care data, as well as user satisfaction surveys from clinicians and patients.

Pennington hopes that as the data becomes more visible and widely used, the quality will increase as the people inputting it will be able to see the impact of not coding things correctly.

“This is very much reliant on people inputting the data and we know some places aren’t using the correct codes and some aren’t using any codes, but we have people in each DHB working hard with frontline teams and coders on this,” she explains.

The healthcare workforce can also learn from each other as they see how other DHBs and services are supporting their patients in different areas of telehealth.

“The dashboard displays a range of data and also highlights areas of excellence, so we encourage clinicians to connect with their colleagues around the South Island to share ideas on telehealth implementation and successes with each other,” Pennington says.