Health IT company Personify Care has bagged a A$5.6 million ($3.7 million) contract from SA Health to extend its digital patient pathways project across the entire state over the next two years. 

THE LARGER CONTEXT

The project started in 2021 as a proof of concept between Personify Care and the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN) with support from the SA government's Go2Gov programme. Digital patient pathways had been deployed in over 20 speciality areas and at the Royal Adelaide Hospital, The Queen Elizabeth Hospital and SA Dental. Since then, it has reduced workload pressure on front-line hospital staff while providing convenient care access to patients. 

In its annual report to the government last year, CALHN further said in detail: "The platform enables the delivery of personalised and accurate patient appointments, digital clinical patient information, an individualised electronic consent process, as well as the ability to measure patient experiences for continuous quality improvement resulting in an enhanced patient experience."

Following the initial trial, Personify Care's digital patient pathways have been deployed for various use cases across the network. At Queen Elizabeth Hospital, these were utilised to digitise its Direct Access Colonoscopy programme, reducing waiting times for patients seeking endoscopy or colonoscopy procedures.

CALHN further used Personify Care's platform to launch My Prehab, a surgical pre-rehabilitation programme which helps patients become fit for surgery.

Elsewhere in SA, the Northern Adelaide Local Health Network also worked with Personify Care to build the Pregnancy Online Platform NALHN, a digital prenatal care platform which helps relieve the administrative burden on midwives while enabling personalised support to pregnant women.  

Also, the Barossa Hills Fleurieu Local Health Network has tapped Personify Care to use digital pathways to enhance its surgery admission process, which now takes 12 minutes from an hour previously.

ON THE RECORD

"We’re pleased to expand our collaboration with SA Health and looking forward to supporting clinical teams develop new models of care that will reduce patient wait times for outpatient appointments and elective surgery while ensuring that frontline nurses, clinicians and staff can spend more of their time on high-value care to the patients that need it most," Personify Care CEO Ken Saman told HealthcareIT News.