St Vincent’s leads the way in adopting virtual technology to drive its COVID response

29 Jun 2021

Following the establishment of the Virtual Care Unit (VCU) in response to the initial COVID outbreak last year, St Vincent’s was recognised as an exemplar in virtual care by NSW Health. This has resulted in the provision of additional seed funding to support further expansion of our virtual care services.

St Vincent’s is currently mid-way through a proof of concept of a Remote Patient Monitoring platform to support the management of patients at home including patients with chronic disease such as diabetes and heart failure.

In order to support our Infectious Diseases and Hospital in The Home (HiTH) teams as they respond to the recent COVID-19 surge, St Vincent’s is driving a rapid go-live of the Remote Patient Monitoring platform in-order to manage all covid positive patients in the community.

The platform provides a tailored patient portal via a mobile phone app, which teamed-up with Bluetooth devices, allows the patient to undertake daily self assessments of their health status. The data on vitals and wellbeing is collated by the app and feeds back to a care provider dashboard which can be viewed with complete portability by all involved clinicians. The dashboard provides a rapid overview of all patients enrolled in the service and allows for an easy assessment of vitals trends and wellbeing.

While the project is being driven by St Vincent’s Innovation & Improvement, the rapid adoption of the go-live platform has been made possible by cross-discipline collaboration between St Vincent’s Integrated Care, Legal, and Digital & Technology.

The team will be also on hand to provide support to all clinical services as they are required to transition their face to face clinical services to telehealth over the coming days. For more information on virtual care please contact Dr Chris Robinson Executive Director of Innovation and Improvement via chris.robinson@svha.org.au.

VCU