Excellence in Technology

Excellence in

Technology

This category is looking for innovation or capability in fields of equipment, communications and information systems. Previous submissions related to electronic PHCRs, demand resourcing for patient transport, integrated CAD programs and improving analytics to drive performance. Each service is encouraged to reflect on how their organisation has used technology in the past twelve months to enhance patient outcomes, staff performance or response capacity.

Sponsored by

Excellence in Technology amii Field Hospital Command System

St John Ambulance Papua New Guinea

Team: Matthew Cannon (team leader), Jacqueline Hennessy (team leader), Lynsey Smit, Derek Welsh, Sarah Duncan and Dr Karen Hammad

As COVID-19 surged in PNG, the demands on St John Ambulance PNG (SJA) skyrocketed. In addition to the usual ambulance service, PNG were asked by the local health authority to set up care centres. In order to increase the capacity to respond, and enhance patient outcomes at the centres, an information technology solution was sought to: - Simplify patient flow management; - Digitise patient admission and care records; - Provide real time situational awareness.

10 days before the first centre was due to open, it was accepted that standard IT solutions would not work and that there needed to be something customised to the situation. Working with technology partner Pointing North, amii Field Hospital was ready to be rolled out in a week. The aim of this project is to increase the capacity of SJA to respond to a surge in COVID cases and enhance patient outcomes. By reducing and simplifying record keeping, clinical staff will have more time to care for patients. More accurate and timely awareness of current demand and expected demand changes will reduce wasted resources and speed up response times. Electronic records combined with in application analytics will enable retrospective learnings

Excellence in Technology CPG app - Bringing clinical best practice to Australia’s most remote areas

St John WA

Team: Deane Coxall (team leader) and Rudi Brits

St John WA is the most geographically diverse ambulance service in the world. Servicing such a large land mass presents a unique set of challenges. Following a review of the existing communication systems for frontline clinical practitioners in 2019, St John WA identified the need for a new system to house the most up-to-date Clinical Practice Guidelines that was fully accessible without internet connection, given the regional footprint of the organisation. It became apparent over time that the existing system was resulting in inconsistencies across the guidelines, with version control identified as a key risk. This, paired with the need for a platform that’s available offline in mobileblackspot areas, resulted in the creation of St John Clinical Resources.

St John Clinical Resources is an online webpage paired with a mirrored offline application that houses official documents including Clinical Practice Guidelines, Clinical Skills, Medication Protocols and Infection Prevention & Control (IPC) Guidelines. By culminating all existing resources into a single-source database, St John WA was able to provide its staff and volunteers with an easily accessible point-of-care reference tool that allows them to deliver patient care as efficiently and safety as possible.

St John WA is the biggest single provider of pre-hospital care by land mass in the world, covering 2.5 million squared km square across 194 service points. To overcome the challenges created by remote work, St John WA needed a system to deliver important information needed by the frontline workforce while out on the road.

This information needed to be fully accessibly in an offline environment given the regional footprint of the ambulance service. The key aims of the product suite were:

- To modernise and streamline the current system for housing Clinical Practice Guidelines and eliminate version control issues,

- To create a system available to the St John WA workforce without internet access given the regional footprint of the organisation, - To enhance patient safety and improve user experience.

By compiling all existing resources into one central, digital location with the ability to be accessed offline, St John WA were able to provide staff and volunteers with a point-of-care reference tool and easy access to up-to-date Clinical Practice Guidelines and other necessary informative documents. This culminated in St John Clinical Resources - an online database paired with a smartphone application available on iOS and Android available offline.

Excellence in Technology Development of the new intranet via SharePoint and implementation of volunteer emails to access the network

SA Ambulance Service

Team: Natalie Gibson (team leader)

During 2019, SAAS deployed Microsoft Office 365, revolutionising how it communicates with its workforce and provides access to clinical information. This has particularly benefitted SAAS’ 1500 volunteers. Key deliverables included: Development of a SharePointbased intranet to become a portal for collaboration and system management. SAASnet (the intranet) now provides collaboration sites under a hub (SAAShub) to host private and secure workspaces for groups to centrally manage workloads, and store and collaborate on documents. Establishing SA Health network access for all SAAS volunteers, inclusive of Microsoft Office 365 licensing. Office 365 introduced significant (and previously unavailable) capabilities, including cloud-based organisational email and remote (on-demand) access to SAASnet and SAAS. Emails for SAAS volunteers, who have previously not been able to access intranet sites because their private emails did not allow sign-in to the SA Government network, were given SAAS specific email accounts that allowed access to the network. This has been a significant project, creating business improvements across the organisation, supporting people and enabling the right information to be provided at the right time so volunteers in particular can support patients.

SAAS needed to move towards a more connected workforce statewide across both staff and volunteers, and to ensure there is just one source of truth for information. In South Australian Government, SAAS was an early adopter of the Microsoft Office 365 suite of applications. The adoption was necessary to move the 1500 volunteers across the state onto an email platform that allowed access to a central intranet including clinical documents, but did not compromise on digital security.

Excellence in Technology NSW Ambulance Far West P25 Radio Network

NSW Ambulance Service

Team: James Ogilvie (team leader), James O’Hehir, Timothy Blake and Matthew Burke

NSW Ambulance embarked upon addressing radio communication in the remote western area of NSW where limited cellular coverage and currently no Public Safety Network (PSN) formerly known as Government Radio Network (GRN) exists. NSW Ambulance designed the Far West Radio Network (FWRN) to upgrade the Broken Hill VHF analogue network to a digital UHF P25 network, allowing NSW Ambulance to standardise critical communication systems across this area.

The FWRN covers approximately 152,000 square kilometres. The network extends North to South from Tibooburra to Wentworth and from the NSW/SA boarder east to White Cliffs, Wilcannia and Ivanhoe. This remote region, covering large distances had limited access to reliable alternative communication systems.

Paramedics and operational staff rely heavily on radio communication to communicate to and from the control centres across NSW to administer quality emergency care including the ability to raise a duress alarm. Quality radio communications, reliability and availability, and the ability for paramedics to access help during duress situations is paramount to staff safety and patient outcomes. Radio telecommunication risks were identified for NSW Ambulance paramedics, patients and volunteers and were highlighted by the legislative assembly’s inquiry into violence against emergency services personnel. NSW Ambulance identified an inherent risk of limited radio communications in the remote far west region of NSW. NSW Ambulance embarked upon a program of works, the ‘Far West Radio Network’ (FWRN), to upgrade the radio communication systems in the area. The purpose of upgrading the FWRN was to improve reliability, resilience, and coverage to bring additional functionality to the far west area utilising the latest advanced digital radio technology and integrating into existing NSW Ambulance Control Centre environments.

Excellence in Technology NSW Ambulance Northern Control Centre Refurbishment

NSW Ambulance Service

Team: Timothy Blake (team leader), James O’Hehir, James Ogilvie, Eileen Clarke and John Varoutsos NSW Ambulance Control Centres play a critical role for patients. They are the first point of contact for care. Control Centres manage a patient’s journey from the initial call, to the arrival of paramedics on the scene, and increasingly, a recovery period, where paramedics ready themselves for further responses.

NSW Ambulance Control Centres manage more than 1. 2 million calls per year for ambulance services from the public, medical officers and health care facilities. They dispatch more than 1,110,000 ambulances per year (3068 per day). Control Centres manage requests for Emergency, Medical and Non-Emergency patient transport services. NSW Ambulance Control Centres in Sydney (Sydney and Aeromedical Control), Charlestown (Northern Control), Warilla (Southern Control) and Dubbo (Western Control). These sites are viewed as critical organisational infrastructure, both in terms of operational functions supporting infrastructure (building services and ICT). Over several years, NSW Ambulance has committed to upgrading Control Centre infrastructure, notably the recent refurbishment of the Northern Control Centre. The Northern Control Centre provides staffing towards the statewide call taking pool, and manages all ambulance movements between Hawkesbury River in the South and the Tweed/ Queensland border in the North. The Great Dividing Range forms the operational boundary to the West. Since its construction in 1999, Northern Control Centre has experienced a significant growth of demand within its span of operational control and shared responsibly in state-wide Triple Zero (000) service management. There has been a steady increase in the staffing requirement to meet demand. However, progressive operational capability was being restricted by an aged internal building layout, lack of suitable staff amenities and, as a flow on, limited ability to provision highly available ICT services.

The Northern Control Centre was considered as the most appropriate site to undertake a full refurbishment, due to its wellplaced physical location, high availability communications infrastructure, and its reasonably modern construction. A reconfiguration of the internal fitout allowed an increase in operator consoles from 13 to 25. The project had to be delivered with minimal Control Centre down time. NSW Ambulance took the opportunity to develop and deliver a critical Control Centre that met our requirements in terms of: • Improved facility offerings (base building, staff welfare, amenities);

• Increased operational capability (resource dispatch flexibility, call volume capacity incident management); • Improved systems of digital and technical resilience and redundancy;

• Readiness to migrate to a new government radio network and telephony solution.

Excellence in Technology Responder.One CAD

St John Ambulance Papua New Guinea

Team: Jacquie Hennessy (team leader), Ryan Lovett (team leader), Matt Cannon, Tristan Mercer and Noileen Ao

Deployment of a custom, modern, responsive and fit for purpose dispatch system. Introduced for PNG’s hosting of APEC in 2018, St John PNG procured a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system to provide a central point of coordination during this busy period. Following APEC it became apparent that the system was inflexible, expensive and did not appropriately support PNG’s operations as the service expanded and demand increased.

St John PNG then partnered with Skerric, an Australian technology start-up with significant experience in CAD systems and mission critical software. The result was the implementation of Responder.One. A modern, web based, feature equivalent CAD system designed entirely within the ambulance context. Responder.One was developed with ambulance services as its primary focus and was designed to match the workflows and contemporary requirements of services in Australia and the Pacific. St John PNG needed a CAD system that was fit for purpose, cost-effective, provided the ability to scale as their demand grew, would operate in the challenging technical and operational environment of PNG and was backed by a vendor who was flexible and responsive. PNG knew what they wanted the CAD system to do. They knew that it had to be easy to use, could be easily deployed in our EOC, from the national health command centre or equally from laptops anywhere in the country.

PNG had used or reviewed CAD systems from all of the vendors who supply existing Australian and New Zealand ambulance services but none were able or willing to meet the needs. PNG need a CAD that provided the ability to start at a modest scale and grow with us as they expanded their national footprint, that provided advanced features (some not available in current systems) and the ability for them to customise or add features quickly and easily. Skerric was the right partner for PNG and had the credibility and willingness to work with them to develop a system that perfectly met their needs, both now and into the future.

Excellence in Technology SoterCoach - Addressing workplace injuries

St John Ambulance Australia NT

Team: George Healy (team leader) and Darryl Shaw St John NT is the first ambulance service in Australia to apply an ergonomic safety app technology to address personal injuries in its workforce. Following an increase in musculoskeletal injuries, primarily among front line staff, St John NT conducted a trial of electronic ergonomic coaching devices designed to personalise training and improve an individual’s ergonomic safety. SoterCoach was selected as the solution for its ability to deliver real-time feedback to workers using a wearable device and provide movement and training recommendations through a mobile app. Evidence has shown that the SoterCoach wearer improves their ergonomic safety by reducing the average number of daily hazardous movements by 30-60%, and actually reduces their risk of injury by 40% in just two weeks. • The device has a 30-day battery life, weighs 20 grams, and fits any body type. • Training is personalised to the individual’s actual movements and injury risk and is delivered to the worker via the app.

• The app gives bursts of relevant micro learning to enable behavioural change. • The worker is in control of their own learning experience. • No connectivity requirement (data downloaded once a day via blue tooth)

The implementation of SoterCoach aims to raise awareness of ergonomically hazardous movements, thus reducing manual handling injuries. By engaging paramedics to self-correct their movements, the program aims to help imprint behavioural change for long-term benefits. Any data collected by St John NT will be made available to the wider emergency response community after completing a broader range of trials.

Excellence in Technology Using Machine Learning to inform helicopter dispatch

St John New Zealand

CATEGORY WINNER

Team: Dave Richards (team leader), Jeannette Perez Mawyin, Dr Michel de Lange, Benoit Auvray, Greg Peyroux, Alesha Smith and Shenghuan Zhang Air Ambulance resources are an expensive but vital part of New Zealand’s ambulance network, with the potential to make a significant difference to health outcomes for injured and ill New Zealanders. This is especially true for patients needing time critical intervention in rural and remote communities. Identifying incidents that may benefit from an air dispatch is currently a manual and time-consuming process for the St John New Zealand Air Desk. To improve this and support the Air Desk, a machine learning (ML) model using gradient boosting has been developed and deployed into the St John real time reporting environment. The ML predictive model has been incorporated into a real time report, which will be deployed onto the Air Desk screens. This report will prioritise incidents for Air Desk Clinical Support Officers (CSOs) to review, by identifying the incidents most likely to require a helicopter response. The machine learning model can predict incidents that likely require a helicopter with a high degree of accuracy. This automation will help the Air Desk quickly identify these incidents so that patients receive quicker helicopter responses and incidents which would benefit from a helicopter, receive one. Helicopters are an expensive but vital resource to dispatch to emergency incidents. The St John New Zealand Air Desk ensures appropriateness of tasking of air ambulance assets by first reviewing incidents before they receive a helicopter response. Air Desk CSOs currently scan all incidents in the Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system as they enter the job queue to determine if they require a helicopter.

Identifying incidents that may benefit from an air dispatch is a manual and time-consuming process for the Air Desk and currently takes on average about 15 minutes per incident. The manual process of scanning each incident means that there can be significant delays to having a helicopter dispatched and this is represented in the 95th percentile for dispatch times being as high as 60-70 minutes.

The aim of this project is to use machine learning to develop a prediction and decision support tool for Air Desk CSOs, to help quickly identify incidents from the stack that likely require a helicopter. The tool should then enable faster decision times, to dispatch helicopters to patients that need them in a timely manner.