Rural health alliance turns to videoconferencing

The Grampians Rural Health Alliance (GRHA), situated in Western Victoria, comprises 12 hospital-based health services, four bush nursing centres and several stand-alone community health centres. It supports improved regional health outcomes by providing technology, applications and communications solutions to connect the region’s health services.

GRHA wanted to implement a videoconferencing network in order to deliver more effective patient treatment and better peer support for clinicians by sharing expertise and resources across a broadband videoconference network. This in turn links more than 40 health facilities in Western Victoria.

With limited numbers of specialised healthcare resources and the large rural area of the Grampians to support, the region’s health services needed to maximise its resources in order to provide more effective patient treatment.

To support GRHA’s requirements for a specialised healthcare videoconferencing network, GRHA turned to Melbourne-headquartered iVision.

The systems integrator oversaw the design and development of the highly customised, integrated and mobile MediLink videoconferencing units. Based on Tandberg technology, the solution includes 17 of the customised videoconferencing units that include integrated digital cameras. In addition, 100 videoconferencing units were deployed across GRHA ensuring that every health service and community health centre has state-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities for patient care and professionals.

The units are suitable for clinical support, supervision and mentoring. The units are also being used by acute care nurses and district nurses to consult with wound care specialists on the needs of individual patients.

Ultimately, the systems will enable health services to provide patients with immediate care - using specialists typically not available in remote areas. This includes improved psychiatric support, patient discharge planning sessions, access to dialysis support nurses and wound care consultants.

More than 1200 hours of videoconferencing are being notched up on the network each quarter and this figure is growing exponentially.

An increase in the ad hoc videoconference is particularly significant because this service is used more frequently by clinicians for clinical support, supervision and mentoring.

Videoconferencing demand was also strong among the region’s psychiatric services, which are increasingly relying on videoconferencing for staff meetings, training, exam preparation and student supervision.

More than 1800 staff members have used the network to participate in e-learning courses.

Moreover, the service is increasingly being used to conduct patient care conferences and to bring together agencies and families when planning patient discharges. This is reducing travel demands on staff and enabling more effective coordinated support for patients and their families.

“When asked about their use of videoconferencing, our managers said that they use the videoconferencing network just like the telephone. It saves significant amounts of time in travelling and improves the communication between the sites,” says David Ryan, Executive Officer of GRHA.