Improving Emergency Care Through Better Interoperability

My Emergency Doctor is Australia’s first telemedicine service staffed by specialist emergency doctors. The company aims to transform emergency medicine by bringing the best possible care to patients, wherever they are. Its services connect senior specialist emergency doctors – Fellows of the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (FACEMs) – with clinicians and patients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The services ease the difficulties of emergency presentation surges, staff shortages and after-hours consultations – for example, allowing hospitals to maintain a regular pattern of FACEM-led board rounds in the middle of the night.

My Emergency Doctor needed to quickly and cost-effectively provide systems interoperability with a major suburban hospital to support an overnight supervision service by facilitating virtual board rounds between emergency department clinicians and emergency specialists. The initiative aimed to improve key performance indicators, including Transfer of Care (ToC) and length of stay.

My Emergency Doctor had previously used a secure file-sharing service to integrate its electronic health record (EHR) system with the systems of its clients, typically regional hospitals with six to eight-bed emergency departments. However, supporting a new virtual board round service for a 60-bed emergency department at a major suburban hospital required a more efficient and streamlined approach. The hospital also indicated its preference to interoperate via the commonly used HL7® messaging standard.

After signing an agreement with InterSystems, My Emergency Doctor implemented an interoperability solution using InterSystems Health Connect Cloud™ within two months, with subsequent integrations expected to be even faster.

Purchased as a pay-as-you-grow cloud service, Health Connect Cloud also provides enhanced interoperability for My Emergency Doctor’s other telemedicine services. This enables My Emergency Doctor to serve larger, more sophisticated healthcare providers and further improve clinical productivity and the patient experience.

“Securely exchanging patient data between hospitals and our clinicians is always front of mind,” says Dr Tatiana Lowe, Medical Director, My Emergency Doctor. “Our virtual board rounds rely on accurate real-time data, and when that data doesn’t flow smoothly, patient care slows down. Clinically, the interoperability solution’s impact has been immediate. Our emergency specialists can access accurate patient information during both board rounds and virtual consults. This improves decision-making, handovers and patient safety.”

“Health Connect Cloud offers a scalable solution with a low barrier to entry, perfectly aligning with our growth trajectory,” says Ben Rhodes, Head of Technology, My Emergency Doctor. “Initially, the most important benefit was meeting the required timeline by leveraging the hospital’s HL7 capability. But with HL7 interoperability, we can also receive more information, get it more quickly, and create a better clinical workflow. If something happens, we get the data immediately, and a nurse doesn’t need to check it. And we can integrate with HL7® FHIR® or use the InterSystems FHIR Server to create a FHIR repository as well.”

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