Bi-lingual remote health management platform deployed for Waikato heart patients

NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A bi-lingual ‘remote health management platform’ is enabling a new targeted community programme providing specialist level care for Māori heart patients in rural Waikato.

Hāpaitia te Hauora Manawa delivers in-home heart checks for at-risk patient groups who traditionally have challenges interacting with the health system.

The technology application enabling the programme was co-designed with Māori, specialist nurses and cardiologists from Waikato Hospital, and a team of data scientists and IS architects at Ahimsa Global.

It is the first time the Ahimsa telehealth platform has been deployed locally and it has been modified for use in New Zealand.

The cloud hosted, web-based application allows specialist cardiologists at the tertiary hospital to provide support to an outreach nurse specialist and echo sonographer when they travel to remote communities for screening via built-in telehealth capability.

Te Reo Māori experts helped with content for the bi-lingual (English - Te Reo Māori) platform, particularly the patient-facing components.

Raj Nair, head of cardiology at Waikato DHB and clinical lead of the programme, says the new platform interfaces patients to the community cardiology nurse, echo sonographer, and specialists at the tertiary centre. In the future it will also interface with primary care.

His cardiology department already uses telehealth for some appointments, but this involves logging into multiple applications to access the relevant patient information, such as blood test results and echocardiograms.

“If the patient is from a remote community some of these applications will be in the neighbouring DHB’s catchment and many of those systems, we can’t see,” Nair explains.

“With a programme like this we need specific information to be able to support the clinicians in the community and this platform collects all the information we need to give immediate answers to them or the patient about their heart health or related issues.

“From the point of contact to the point of care pathway, everything is in the same platform.”

The platform pulls some patient information from the National Health Index and data is entered directly by clinicians in the community.

Patients are also encouraged to log into the platform and can enter their own information, such as blood pressure, if they are able to do so.

Three hospital-based cardiologists have been allocated to support the community team when required.

Nair says that bringing technology to the community will help to address some of the inequities that exist within the health system.

“This strategy will pick up 80-90 percent of serious heart disease, then patients are given the option of coming to the hospital, or if it’s a moderate problem, getting follow up care in the community,” he says.

“The health reforms and the establishment of the two new health authorities will hopefully bring a strategic shift towards supporting innovations such as this for our population in urban and rural regions from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.”

Māori liaison specialist nurse, Patumahoe Leaf-Wright, says the programme is an opportunity to try doing something “quite radically different”.

“It doesn’t fit the DHB mold of how these things go at all. The whole point is to do it differently, to have a completely different approach,” she says.

Several other Primary Health Organisations across New Zealand have expressed interest in replicating the programme.

Picture: Māori liaison specialist nurse, Patumahoe Leaf-Wright

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