Monday 24 November 2008
Innovative IT Project Helps to Identify Healthcare Breaches
An innovative IT system for the healthcare industry has been developed in
This timely innovation will assist healthcare managers to more accurately monitor key clinical indicators, better identify, and more quickly respond to issues, opportunities and trends as they arise.
Facilitated by the Australian Institute for Commercialisation (AIC), Brisbane-based systems company Opus5K was engaged by Queensland Health following a public tender to commercialise the Variable Life Adjusted Display system, which goes under the vampire-like acronym of VLAD. The system is currently used by the department to support their clinical governance procedures.
After several interstate institutions approached Queensland Health to request the use of the system’s intellectual property (IP), it was apparent that a commercial partner was needed to abstract the concepts of the existing VLAD and re-architect it such that it could be made available to a far wider audience of health organisations.
AIC Government Innovation Services Director, Greg Moran, said this was an excellent example of Queensland Health and industry working more closely together to achieve government outcomes.
“This arrangement assists Queensland Health in focusing on core business and service delivery, while outsourcing the commercial rights of their product to Opus 5K. The commercial arrangement between the two parties is stipulated in the exclusive license brokered and monitored by the AIC,” Mr Moran said.
“Opus 5K now has the opportunity to take this product to market based on the partnership developed with Queensland Health, and align the products further development based on international and national standards.”
With more than 70 per cent of the new system currently developed, Opus 5K Director Hassan Kani said he expected a complete migration to a web-enabled environment to take place by Christmas this year.
“The new VLAD system provides an easily understood graphical overview of clinical outcomes over a period of time,” Mr Kani said.
“I am going to redevelop the whole monitoring system, so that’s it’s a complete end-to-end solution,” Mr. Kani said.
“It not only gives me access to all the other states and their health departments, but also their access to the private hospitals as well,” expressed Mr. Kani.
“Once hospital data has been imported into the system, any breaches of tolerance limits are automatically identified, triggering a workflow-based investigation process to identify the causes of the breach. Of course, these breaches may be positive as well as negative, as these positive breaches may provide us with an insight into how health care services and practices can be continually improved.”
Prior to the VLAD project, Opus5K successfully completed a patient travel system for Queensland Health, which is currently being trialled in selected hospital sites. The transfer of this experience in hospital IT projects combined with the existing Queensland Health project opportunities proved to be a successful combination for the systems vendor in securing the public tender for VLAD.
VLAD is also under review as an enterprise system for Queensland Health and will result in substantial cost savings in implementation for Government.
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