Page 4298 - Week 12 - Thursday, 24 October 2019
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The aim of CCP is to assist in maintaining a coordinated approach to managing a patient’s condition. CCP assists the client to remain well in the community, navigate and engage with our health system and prevent unnecessary hospital presentations and admissions. The report notes that CCP is the closest we have to a patient navigation service at present in the ACT.
A successful navigation service should support a person to self-manage their conditions as much as possible. In doing so, navigation services improve patient outcomes and the overall quality of healthcare delivery. The report suggests that a more coordinated approach to patient care in the ACT, including better data systems and better discharge practices, could improve the patient experience for those with complex or chronic conditions and reduce the incidence of avoidable hospital admissions.
The report identifies the flow of information as critical to enabling effective patient navigation services. The report noted that the Canberra health system had over 200 IT systems that capture and store patient information, leading to fragmentation and frustrating coordination of care. As members may recall, in May this year the ACT government released the ACT digital health strategy 2019-29. The government is investing $106 million in capital over the next eight years to support the digital health record, a key activity to support the achievement of the strategy.
The strategy sets out the government’s vision for enabling and delivering person-centred care through digital innovation. A core component of the strategy is progressing clinical information integration and ensuring that information can be shared across systems and is accessible to healthcare providers.
Key to realising this vision will be the delivery of the digital health record. The digital health record is a comprehensive record of interactions between a person and publicly funded health services in the ACT. It will be centred around the person, rather than focused on clinical speciality or treatment location. Additionally, a patient’s healthcare team will be able to more readily access information, improving care and reducing errors. It will enable them to better focus on the person requiring care, rather than spending time searching for key health information.
Finally, the report highlights the importance of addressing the social needs of the patient, including lifestyle factors or social issues that are either contributing or protective factors to a patient’s condition, for example, financial security, transport to and from appointments, and health literacy. Importantly, layperson navigation programs have proven particularly successful in improving access to health services for vulnerable populations, such as lower socioeconomic groups and culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
Other issues, such as the mapping of privacy implications and consent arrangements to allow data sharing across health services, still need to be considered in the development of a patient navigation service. I acknowledge that patient navigation services should be implemented more broadly and we can apply these learnings to other areas of the health system.
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