Altera Digital Health brings a world of experience and innovation to New Zealand

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Altera Digital Health brings a world of experience and innovation to New Zealand

Tuesday, 16 August 2022

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FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - Altera Digital Health

Last month, Altera Digital Health announced its debut in the New Zealand market following Te Whata Ora Waikato’s decision to implement the award-winning Provation iPro anaesthesia solution at the Waikato and Thames hospitals. The project is being implemented by two local Altera Digital Health representatives and whilst the Altera name is new, the company is far from new to the delivery of digital healthcare.

Altera Digital Health is in fact the former Hospital and Large Physician Practice business segment of Allscripts, which was recently acquired by Constellation Software Inc, a subsidiary N. Harris Computer Corporation.

But what does the global leader bring to the fast-evolving New Zealand health sector and how does it respond to calls for the market to focus on equity, efficiency, effectiveness, entrepreneurship and excellence?

Innovation and experience
Altera Digital Health, then known as Allscripts, entered the Australian market in 2016 and in only a few short years established a brand synonymous with innovative digital healthcare delivery. In South Australia, it has led the roll out of what is arguably the most ambitious state-wide implementation of an electronic medical record in Australian history.

From its beginnings at the state-of-the-art Royal Adelaide Hospital in 2017, Altera and SA Health have extended the Sunrise EMR platform—which has been implemented all over the world and is a market leader in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Singapore—to almost all major hospitals and health centres in South Australia including the Mt Gambier and Districts Hospital some 500 kms from Adelaide.

In Australia, Altera Digital Health is also pioneering cloud-based electronic health record systems through a partnership with Microsoft. The Gippsland Health Alliance (GHA) is a consortium of the publicly funded health services in the Gippsland region of Victoria (<41,556 km²) and through the reliability and security of Microsoft Azure, GHA’s clinicians are accessing and exchanging information in real time through a single, integrated platform. GHA’s operational, financial and IT teams are streamlining their core functions, sharpening the focus on patients instead of inefficient, ineffective workflows.

In November 2020, Allscripts completed the roll out of its Sunrise EMR platform at the Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) and since then, GHA has extended its cloud-based EMR to other health sites across the length and breadth of the region including Central Gippsland Health Service, Bairnsdale Regional Health Service (servicing east Gippsland), West Gippsland Healthcare Group and Bass Coast Health, which covers the southern part of the region. Through its cloud-based EMR, GHA is realising a myriad of scalability, cost efficiency and risk-resilience benefits.

In the planning phases of the implementation of GHA’s EMR, it was envisaged that the system would need to accommodate approximately 300 users, but by the time the system was completed, there were more than 400 registered users. In a system defined by physical infrastructure, this may have necessitated the management, purchasing and installation of additional servers, but with a cloud-based system, this change in scope can be accommodated in a less complicated and costly manner. Likewise, the system offers enhanced flexibility, enabling the addition of temporary users, irrespective of their physical location, in a safe and timely manner, such as is required in the healthcare sector when external physicians and clinicians are brought in on a temporary basis for a specific purpose.

Improving interoperability
It is widely accepted that in the New Zealand health sector, improved interoperability will not only support the use of technology but will also accelerate the pace of clinical research through extraction of real-world data in digital health systems. Altera Digital Health has a lot to offer on this front through its delivery of South Western Sydney Primary Health Network’s (SWSPHN) innovative Integrated Real-time Active Data (iRAD) interoperability project, which has enabled healthcare organisations to share patient-consented health records across the continuum of care.

SWSPHN serves a population of 1.1M and is spread across seven local government areas of Bankstown, Fairfield, Liverpool, Camden, Campbelltown, Wollondilly and Wingecarribee. One of the biggest challenges facing healthcare delivery is the sharing of clinical datasets from multiple services and disparate systems.

It is broadly accepted that easy and timely access to patient information across different sites, for example, the patient records of a general practice and a hospital situated in the same community, enables clinicians to be better informed, leading to improved patient management.

Connecting care
In 2017, SWSPHN partnered with Altera Digital Health to develop Project iRAD, which is now pioneering open, connected health communities in Australia—a flagship project committed to achieving better patient outcomes and which reflects the enthusiastic willingness of a diverse range of health service providers to deliver their services as part of a connected community in Australia.

iRAD was established to enhance the sharing of patient information, typically, when the patient is accessing services in more than one setting. These incorporate general practices, outpatient services, antenatal shared care sites, after-hours clinics, residential aged-care and palliative-care services. iRAD shares a host of patient and clinical information datasets, including demographics, diagnoses, medications, allergies, pathology and radiology. The project now comprises more than 70 general practices and a large local hospital emergency department. For clinicians, the benefits of iRAD includes access to reliable health information through a simple and intuitive system that aids informed clinical decision-making.

Altera Digital Health’s role in iRAD is in the delivery of its cloud-based interoperability platform, the dbMotion Solution, which is available to the Australian market via Microsoft Azure. iRAD is the first implementation of dbMotion in the Asia-Pacific region and is also the first implementation globally on the Microsoft Azure platform.

iRAD reduces the administrative burden by saving time and limiting duplication and is well received by patients who no longer have to explain their health issues to multiple clinicians or have duplicate tests undertaken unnecessarily.

The name Altera is an amalgamation of two terms. “Alt” denotes height and “era” signifies a distinct period of time. A new age in healthcare technology in New Zealand has just begun and Altera Digital Health is excited to be a part of it.