641 - Empowering Clinicians with Actionable Data: The HealthCare Logic Difference

0:00Peter Birch: Have you ever heard a term in digital health and just quietly had to Google it later? The Talking Health Tech Glossary has got you covered. We've got hundreds of terms in plain English explanations, written for our industry, and all free to use. You don't even have to sign up for anything. Just go to talkinghealthtech.com slash glossary. Welcome to the Talking Health Tech podcast. My name is Peter Birch. Today on this show, I'm joined by Brett Sellars, a head of clinical solutions, and Chris Reid, Platform Specialist, both at Healthcare Logic. G'day, gents. How are you going? Yeah. G'day, Peter.

0:34How are you today? Yeah, good, mate. Really nice to see you, mate.

0:37Peter Birch: Yeah, likewise. It's good to sit down and have a chat on the podcast, particularly at this time because if someone's been observant on the Talking Health Tech feed, they've probably seen a little bit of content around command centres and also just out there in the ecosystem too, this concept of going beyond dashboards and getting cleverer with data and giving some more informed insights. It seems like an apt kind of time to connect in with you guys about Healthcare Logic, the work you're doing, and also what you're seeing in healthcare out there in the real world, so to speak. But maybe I'll start with you, Brett, and then I'll go to Chris.

1:16Peter Birch: For those unfamiliar with Healthcare Logic and the work you do, tell us a bit about that and also the work you do in healthcare too. So thank you, Peter. So my name is Brett Sellers. I've been 26 years this year in healthcare, primarily working as a clinician within the emergency departments on the Gold Coast and greater Brisbane area. I fell in love with data and I worked out that data could be my friend very early in my career for some of the roles that I've held. So I've held every position from a graduate nurse all the way through to an executive director level within the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service.

1:49And I'm currently still a clinician in the emergency department in Rabina ED. So I'm very lucky. I get to use this information on a day-to-day basis. I'm from one of my jobs working for Healthcare Logic in the clinical solutions environment. I get to help develop these solutions and to sort of generate this information. And then I get to go on the floor in the afternoon and be able to use that information to be able to deliver care to my patients and to improve their journey as they transition through our service.

2:17Peter Birch: love that you can be the guy that says oh clinicians definitely need this thing and then you get in there in the room like oh i don't know whether that was a good idea yeah 100 you need that you need that real world insight right because uh so often we can build in um uh in isolation or think what we think we know even based on clinical experience from a couple of years ago um i'm as we discuss um we might find that um you know you need that real world experience right now because things change but what about you chris what keeps you busy Yeah, so I previously, before I even got into healthcare, I used to work in statistics, looking at predicting ratings for TV or live sky sports audiences in the UK and then working in radio.

2:58So moving into healthcare was very much a very, very strange transition, but I'm a big fan of numbers anyway. So it was my wife being in an infection control nurse was really what kind of swayed me moving over to work to a different industry. And it was just really useful just to try and find out just how you, you know, going from kind of revenue generation in a, you know, in a media format, all of a sudden, how do you use data to actually help a patient and turning a patient from a number into actually, this is a real person that we're trying to just get through the health system in the best possible way that we can do.

3:30And so when I joined the company, I think we've been going for just over a decade now, we were pretty much born out of public healthcare. And what was amazing was just seeing just some of the early prototypes of our platform and how we were able to I guess work alongside clinical teams to you know just work out what is it that you need now to try and help you manage your health service and so you know pulling on the on the knowledge of Brett where we pretty much stood in an emergency department with him after he had just walked out of a recess and essentially just said what do you need now to try and manage your emergency department because you've got patients in a waiting room you've got patients that are currently on a bed on a stretcher that are waiting to be transitioned to one of the you know, to one of the areas.

4:12And then we've got these patients waiting to move on in their journey to an inpatient ward or to be discharged. And it was just the amount of insight that Brett was able to give us from a clinical perspective was actually to say, you know what, we actually already collect a lot of data. How can we do this in the most productive way? Because we don't need everything. We only need a subset of that to actually make some really good, meaningful decisions. And so it's been a real journey for us at Healthcare Logic. As I said, for about 10 years, It's never a final platform. We're constantly evolving and developing because you just have to with healthcare.

4:41You know, the demand doesn't stop. And I think that's really been a really great journey just from us in terms of how we've been able to keep on evolving with the end users always in mind as well.

4:51Peter Birch: I totally didn't know your media background, though. The radio and TV face, I reckon we just changed the topic of this conversation about that. But that would be self-indulgent. And command centers and healthcare and data is probably more interesting, to be honest. but a chat for another time, chat for another time. And actually to Chris's point, Brett, you know, because I was even just reflecting on my non-clinical kind of need and this excitement that you get with all of a sudden, if you've got all these new tools and all this data available to you, I could pull any kind of dashboard and I can put this metric against this thing.

5:23Peter Birch: And then I kind of get back to work and I didn't even look at, like it looked very nice, but it kind of didn't change anything that I actually did like during the day, if you know and there are definitely so like that that was just data for data sake but then there's when you get it right it kind of changes what you do so I'm interested from your perspective because you're doing you know healthcare on a day-to-day still what actually changes in say a hospital setting when you can kind of see what's happening in real time in this kind of command center sort of way. 100 % I think you know the biggest thing that I identified as a clinician over many years and as I progressed in my career into sort of you know leadership positions we do a really good job.

6:00Everybody in the health service is focused on delivering care. I don't think you can actually do this for a job unless you're a caring person and you want to help people. So I think it's taking that enthusiasm. But what we've traditionally done in the past is that we've reacted to situations. We've waited for it to break before we've deployed a response to that situation. We've waited for the emergency department to be overloaded. We're waiting for the situation where we've got ambulance ramping and a full waiting room. We're waiting until our inpatient surgical lists and our outpatient lists are starting to get extravagant before we actually respond and we deploy a response to that situation.

6:39One of the exciting things for me as a clinician is that with this information, I can take that information and I can deploy a response to it preemptively and it's an informed reaction. So instead of just going, I think we've done this for the last 25 years, I think we should continue to do it. We're starting to identify within these pieces of information what's working, what's not working, and then we can really deploy a targeted response to the situation we're trying to manage. And once again, the whole reason behind that is that we want to improve our patient's journey. We want to make sure that, you know, as a person who's getting a bit later on in life, I have a perverse incentive.

7:15When I started my career, it was because that could have been my mother or my father or my grandparents that are sampling service. But as I get older, it could be me. So I want to make sure that, you know, as we get moved forward in the way that we use this information, that we're being able to, you know, deliver care to our patients, but we're making informed decisions about the information that we've got. And the biggest thing on that for me as a clinician is that instead of now just reacting to a situation, I've identified how important it is to move away from the spot fire and just putting out the spot fires all the time to becoming a little bit more strategic, moving away from those operational objectives and in increasing the amount of strategic time that I have in my day so that I can then preemptively deploy a response and identify the where the risk is going to be moving forward and then by identifying that risk then I've got an opportunity to be able to either stop that risk from happening or or limit the amount of risk that is exposed to

8:10Peter Birch: the environment yeah totally the I'm interested in in Chris's take on it too I guess as well because if you know putting together all of this information for clinicians to look at and and sometimes i'd imagine it's kind of like uh you're unlocking new insights by perhaps there's correlations between two bits of data but you kind of want to make sure you're you're presenting the right data so that it's actually usable in real time i keep thinking of all those remember all those random kind of um you know bits of data that that statisticians put together is it like like the what's one like if there are more ice cream trucks at the beach, then there's more shark attacks.

8:50Peter Birch: And so maybe we just don't need ice cream trucks at the beach. So, you know, how do you kind of work out what's relevant data to be able to put into, you know, this visibility for clinicians to actually use on a day-to-day, Chris? Yeah, I think that's really where the co-collaboration when you're designing anything is just so crucial with any of this stuff. I think there are, you know, people who we've seen and we've worked with before coming out of a hospital where, you know, it's essentially they've developed something and then they've said, hey, this will be really great and this will help you achieve X.

9:21And then they give it to you and you go, this isn't going to help me in my day-to-day really from a, you know, from a, you know, in this industry does not work. So working alongside and actually getting the insights. And again, it's one thing when you've got everything is driven by the clinical decision. Ultimately, you know, an executive isn't going to make the call unless we have to escalate there. But, you know, but it's always going to be the clinician who's going to determine you know yes we're going to be you know admitting a patient or discharging them or what's the next course of action for them and they don't necessarily care about the four hour targets that we've got they don't care about times they're just caring about the patient care and making sure that person gets the best possible care that they can so that they are moved safely through the environment but when we wrap that all up we have to obviously work alongside the executive teams as well because they do care about performance because that's who they are you know accountable for as well for a health service.

10:09And obviously, they're trying to pull budgets from wherever they possibly can, because they're just trying to, you know, give their health service the best possible opportunity to keep on being as awesome as they possibly can do. So it's that what we call it, you know, it's a common language, we call it where, you know, what the clinical teams can see from their frontline views, it should aggregate up into a way that the director of that particular team who manages that portfolio can also understand it. So when Brett has to do an escalation, you know, he's having a meaningful conversation with you know his his director or whoever he needs to speak up to in order to try and get the next decision moved if it's not you know if it's out of brett's hands if you like so it's really important to you know involve many many stakeholders when you are designing anything it's one thing you know i think if you were to put a date around list and say right we need to just you know create some visualizations that essentially looks at patient flow it's so open to interpretation so you need to get very very specific and we've seen so many times when you're designing something from scratch, just the internal, you know, creep scope off, you know, of just everything just being blown all out of the place because we just don't know what, where we want to finish in the end.

11:16So, you know, when we've designed this thing, we've, you know, we've designed it with the intention of trying to build relationships and the change management that comes behind all of this as well, as opposed to just numbers, like numbers in form, but it's the actions that really are going to do something at the back of it.

11:30Peter Birch: So yeah, digital health has got a pretty series acronym problem. And we've all got our favorites, but it's a lot, right? And you don't really want to be the person in a meeting that has to ask what something stands for after you've been talking about it for the past couple of weeks. That's why we've built the THT Glossary. It's a free, ever-growing library of digital health terms that we explain in simple language written for people who actually work in the industry. So it's useful if you're brand new in the space, or you're one of the veterans that just want a refresher before a meeting, or maybe you want to check to make sure we've got everything in there.

12:06Peter Birch: It's all there for you. Have a look at talkinghealthtech.com slash glossary. Bookmark it. Send it to your team. It's the kind of thing that should exist. So we created it. Hope you enjoy. 100%. I mean, that brings me to my next kind of thing I was thinking of as well. And that's the interest in biofibular perspectives actually on this, because you could build the technology. You can build the solutions that, you know, in theory will address the issue. But in the end, you not just need the thing to be, you know, implemented and connected. Because, again, that's kind of a technology challenge. It's then the people actually using it to inform what they do and potentially change how they work or at least, you know, lean into those tools rather than doing the old kind of way.

12:52Peter Birch: like how do you go about from you know your side Chris and then interested in in your take kind of as well too Brett in mate you talked about that co-design piece and it did flag to me as well like internally this thing I'm noticing more and more with you know for on one on one hand we talk about we should co-design and make sure we've got all the feedback when we're building things front on because then you know we make sure everyone feels heard but then almost a little bit to your point too crisp because all of a sudden you've got scope creep that comes in or like no this isn't going to work that's kind of annoying when you're building something it's kind of like but I guess that's the point um but everyone's got budgets everyone's got timelines and all of this so you can bring everyone in early if you don't do it well it kind of you just have a bunch of people that disagree on things because they've got different kind of stakeholder needs how do you kind of start untangling that so you've got actually something useful in the process and And what does that look like?

13:48Yeah, absolutely. I don't know whether you've seen the old picture of like someone looking at a picture of a six on the floor and one person standing there and they look at it and it's a nine. But the other person looks at it and it's a six. It's just like, yeah, but it's the same. It's the same image. So so when we when we design this stuff, essentially, if you're if you're in a shift, for example, you know, the insights you want to pull from it are very different to the people that might be working in the command center. So if you were looking and I'll take one of our examples, if you were to build out the screens from left to right, you know, you'd be looking at, you know, patients coming in from from the ambulance.

14:19You know, how busy is the emergency department in the waiting room? What are patients waiting for in terms of, you know, is it subspecialty review? Is it, you know, an admission request? You know, how is our, you know, the capacity of our hospital currently right now when we break that down by division? where do we have scheduled demand coming in because we need to make sure that we don't want to cancel any more electors surgeries because we're all still trying to you know catch up from covid for some of our hospitals as well um and then you know all the way through to you know what's our discharge planning and how's our icus and how some of those specialist environments so from a screen you know from from left to right that's how we've designed it but it's the people and the roles in the room that's where the real kind of action happens and so what we've been able to do is have a look and essentially we've designed what we call our playbooks if you like um where we look at each of the individual roles within the uh you know like a command center and but we it's about what what's the visualization in front of you for the part of the journey that you play so you know so the the playbooks that we've designed have been for each of the individuals whether you are the clinician on the floor and brett can go into that in a lot more detail than i can but you know when you're coming through to those admission requests or where are the bottlenecks we can see it on a big screen without having to get a big situation report from anyone and again wasting time but for the bed managers they can see where you know the next load of patients need to go where the requests are coming from and it's that you know having the person next to them not just you know the nurse unit manager on the ward who they need to liaise with but the porterage staff who need to physically move that patient the cleaning staff that need to go and sort out that room of the patient just being discharged as well as the patient that's about to move from one of the you know areas or you know one of the pods in the ed all of those all play a part and they all take time in the journey um but this is essentially where we've we've been kind of co-developing it's one thing providing visualizations and providing a system but it's actually working alongside those teams and every hospital is so different you've got you know your major metros who are sport for resources in some instances and then you go out to the you know the regional and rurals and they just don't you know they've got one person who's doing five you know five different roles so what's the insight what's the information that we can give those people to actually help them with the decision making that that they need to make um and that's um that's essentially where we've we've played kind of really really well we've made massive gains in that because that's also forms part of the change management any any time i've with demo the first thing they you know usually ask us is this this is great how's your change management go and that's always so so so crucial but um but yeah no that's that's the same where we've been able to kind of support.

16:51Yeah.

16:51Peter Birch: What about you, Brett? Interesting. Yeah, no, that's a really good segue for me. I can remember 10 years ago when we were doing that episode where we're standing in the middle of the emergency department and then we're moving around the whole hospital. And I said three things at that point in time. I said, the information that we're about to provide our clinicians, it has to be no more work for the clinician because we're already breached our threshold of activity. It has to be information that you can't live without. So once they've got it, they can't live without it. And then it has to be in a format that is going to be able to be used from everyone from the most tech savvy, data savvy person all the way down to the latest adopter.

17:29So it has to be able to be utilised by every role within the organisation. And based on those three things, we were able to do something with our information, which I think is quite unique. And I think we've all been involved in different areas of our lives where we've been very flush with the information. We have a lot of information, a lot of data. We get reports every day. And my favorite thing was Control-Alt-Delete because I just couldn't have the time to go through them. I had so much information, but I was doing absolutely nothing with it. So that was the transition for us as an organization is that we wanted to make sure that once that information was presented to our customer, that it was something that they could use and we help them on the transition and it's that governance around how we're going to use that information.

18:16I think Chris highlighted it before is that with the pieces of information we've had and with the co-design that we've been able to do with all the clinicians that we've worked with over the years, we've been able to come up with a subset of information which we know hits the mark and the clinicians want to know about that information. And then what we've also done is we embed ourselves into the organisation to learn the idiosyncrasies that Chris was talking about because the way that you do business about putting someone onto a bed request in one facility might be different to another facility.

18:46And we're learning your pain points, we're learning your pressure points, and we're learning what the front of mind issues are for your organization. And then we can customize our product to be able to make sure that the data is representing, A, how you want the information to be seen. And it's also giving you information that you can tangibly react to. And going back to my original comments before, we want that information to be others say, okay, I've seen a breach in the threshold point, and now we can deploy that response at an organizational level. And then it's also the biggest thing, and we talk about healthcare all the time about having silos, because we're so busy, we're all so focused on giving the care delivery to our patients in our own environments, that sometimes we forget about what the challenges and the pressure points are in the other areas of the organization.

19:30So by having this information and being able to share that right across the organization, we can then see a response. So if I'm sitting in the emergency department and I'm at maybe 200 % occupancy, I can actually see the response from the rest of the organisation about how they're gonna help me moving forward. Likewise, if the inpatient environments is where the stresses are today, because they've had 26 people come back from theatre today, there's five people who are having regular observations, there's TPN to be set up and all these different things, I can see that information. And then down in the emergency department, I can make sure that patient's got their medications written up, they've had their antibiotics, and I can do all the things that I can do to make sure that patient's safe to transition to that home ward environment.

20:15Peter Birch: I reckon there are some clinicians that would be checking out this episode that would be like, that sounds really cool if that kind of capability existed. But the reality of it is, Brett, that that's just not what it looks like. Like what's that, and it kind of goes to Chris's point as well. What's the overdone saying of the, it's just not evenly, the future's here, but it's just not evenly distributed. And, you know, in some locations we've got this capability, others we don't. You know, and I guess Brett, you've got that, the view both within the particular hospital that you're at and the Gold Coast, but also in speaking with customers elsewhere, you can kind of see what happens around the country.

20:54Peter Birch: what's your kind of take on the current state of like implementations or I guess the readiness that that we've got as a system for something that makes sense as you describe it there but then it's it's got to hit the reality of of healthcare everywhere oh 100 look you know we've done this over 170 times around the world now um and you know one of the successes of being able to do that with so many different people is that yep 100 there'll be pieces of information that are unique to your home environment, but there's always a subset of the top 10 things that happen in every environment in the world as well.

21:28And so by identifying them early, what we can do is we can come to you with a pre-designed package of, you know, improvement cycles and playbooks and all those sorts of things that Chris was talking about. But then we can also customize the product to be able to make sure that your environment is represented the way that you want it to be represented as well. And that's actually one of the challenges I really, really like about my job within healthcare logic right now, is I love going into an environment and having those guys come and challenge me on a day-to-day basis about, you know, asking me those questions, you know, that won't work here or, you know, these things aren't, you know, it's not relevant for this environment.

22:03But I actually love that challenge because what it's allowing me to do is to move into that environment. And as I said before, because we have those subject matter experts within the organization that we can embed within the organization, we can learn the way that they do their business. We can also learn as a company as well, some new ways that people are delivering healthcare around the world. And then we can also customize our approach. And then the good thing about that is that we're setting up a network worldwide at the same time. Because I know of a person who might have done this in a hospital in Victoria, or South Australia, or in Belfast, anywhere that we're working, we can start to see, we can link people together as well, so that we can then start to not have to reinvent the wheel all the time, but we can customise these approaches so that it's unique to that environment.

22:49But they're getting the outcome they want, which is improving care delivery.

22:52Peter Birch: I imagine, too, being an Australian company, the understanding of the Australian health system, because there's solutions that exist. It's technology. You could use anything in theory. But from experience, too, there's always a difference between what phase one looks like and phase two looks like. you know what I mean? So I guess having that real world experience within Australian healthcare, that makes a lot of difference too. Just to add on to that as well, I think that's been, again, that natural evolution of being born out of a public hospital and seeing the challenges firsthand and working in those environments and what works for Australian healthcare, that's been pivotal, again, just in terms of the development, because we do have these amazing EMR systems and all these different systems which capture data in a certain way.

23:41but they're also in some instances quite siloed for an end user to get a report out. You're, you know, you're logging into five different systems to try and have a look at, you know, how's my outpatients doing and my surgery and how's that affecting, you know, obviously my inpatient beds, but then I need to think about my emergency department. And sometimes we capture those in all different school systems. And it's just a nightmare to try and just pull out something which is just kind of comparing apples for apples, if you like. And, you know, and even within, you know, like, you know, districts where they've got three or four hospitals that will, you know or report to the one health service if you like uh you know we've seen so much variation between all those different types of areas as well and so just being able to standardize some of that information in a single platform if you like it allows you to then go out and actually see where the variation exists um but then also if we have you know doctors for example that are you know visiting you know multiple hospitals it gives them visibility about where their demand is coming from as well so that they can be most effective which is all they really want to do whenever they, you know, when they're turning up every day, they want to be as productive as they possibly can do.

24:41So if we can provide those insights, you know, with anything that we develop, that's massive wins for us, you know, because we don't want clinicians to be sitting in front of the screens all day long. Of course not. We want them to be by the patient bedside, the same with our nursing teams. So if we could provide, you know, just out of all of that subset of information, which are capturing in those existing source systems, you know, we should provide it in a way that actually should just be a, yeah, I might need to look at something one or two times, or actually the information is being pushed to me on my device.

25:10That's great, because this is actually going to, you know, give me the next action that I need to take now in order to try and, you know, support that patient in their journey through the hospital. So I think that's really where, you know, as I said, coming out of the public service and actually seeing those things firsthand has really helped us to really kind of get our mind about how we develop. It's not just a visualization on a screen. It's actually there's real meaning behind a lot of this stuff.

25:32Peter Birch: yeah no yeah totally and the i guess if to round it out then um you know again keen to hear from you both and go chris first the directionally where do you see it all going then like because if i think about the vibe of this chat and just generally what health systems are asking for what what technology is being built you know some of those common threads are giving clinicians more of that face time that you you referred to chris um access to more information but actually knowing what to do with it. I think that the rate of innovation and technology is going to be, you know, definitely an enabler of that, but we've got to deal with the realities of healthcare systems and budgets and, you know, and the humans are the ones that do the caring and that, you know, we've probably maxed out a lot of the humans and the clinicians and non-clinical too within health systems asking to do more and more for less essentially or within the same period of time.

26:27Peter Birch: So as a health system, where do you see it all kind of going and the need, the technology needs to do and and how's that kind of shaping what what healthcare logic is doing yeah i mean i don't think i'm saying anything different when i say things like you know just the speed of delivering insight to action i think that's been said 101 times where you know we have an abundance of data in hospitals and you know and and with you know just just overarching across our industry but we need to be able to make it user and role specific so we actually you know we can't generalize to a point you know we need to be able to make it very very specific to an end user um but then as part of that it's also you know i mean yes ai is huge but ai incorporates lots of different things like machine learning for example it's not just you know ai is just oh yes it's just all predictive stuff there's all different elements which come into it so it's just really you know approaching that with caution as well because sometimes we we have this pie in the sky idea but we just you know are you know trying to catch up to you know where we want to try and get to we can have a great idea and you know even things like yes you know we're creating something and you know go go live is going to be a great day and we're going to be cutting a ribbon and everyone's going to be high-fiving and patient care is just going to be solved yeah it's not the finish line in any way it's it's it's the start of the journey you know all the you know all the go live days is just a milestone day that's all it is because because you have to think about okay we've got the data now we've got all of these things and we're delivering insight that's awesome but we still need to address the clinical workflows we need to create escalation pathways and you know that that may need you know rejigging after many many years in some instances or creating from scratch um and so it's it's great to have all this idea about tech and things like that but ultimately you still have the same the same staff and when they've been exposed to so many new systems and you know learning a brand new emr it it becomes a real challenge for them and they get burnt out and so you have to do things and approach those things with real caution and like i said like you know you have to include them when you're designing or collaborating on, you know, on anything you intend to roll out in the future, because they've seen systems before and it's a case of, oh, we'll get a new one again next year.

28:34We'll get another one in five years time. And they're just, as I said earlier, they just burn out with this stuff. So it has to be sustainable and you have to keep on improving those types of things as well. I think just as the evolution of tech and all the insights that we're constantly generating, I think there's real great work that's happening with working with vendors, as an example, because we've had the luxury of working with 170 or 180 different installations, and we're bringing those insights to individual health services. So the ability, and Brett said it, and we have done it many times, where a hospital in, you know, in Adelaide, you know, an orthopedic director in one of those health services has said, this is the challenge I'm currently going through.

29:19And we've put them in touch with someone in the Republic of Ireland. And if we said, this is someone who's working through the same kind of health service, the same type of challenge, but this is how they were able to overcome some of those challenges. And it's that connection, that communication, it's massive when you try and build out those types of networks.

29:35Peter Birch: So yeah, like I think about that often, actually when I speak to health systems that you know build themselves as opposed to to work with others and being able to tap into that shared kind of knowledge which in the end you know benefits health systems everywhere are often overlooked you know but yeah and and look I absolutely think you know any any time that event or comes in or anything along those lines it has to complement the work that's already been done locally because there will be lots of bespoke work that's being done which cannot be replicated and so you have to complement those teams and give them time back in their day to create all of these you know different insights as well that they're trying to manage because it's not just patient flow that they're looking at they're looking at you know other clinical research things and they're supporting you know all types of different requests and so if you're if you're hiring a you know a digital transformation team but all they're doing is you know creating reports that's not a digital transformation team that's a reporting team.

30:34So it's really hard to get that. Absolutely. Yeah.

30:39Peter Birch: What about you, Brett? Look, I'm very passionate about healthcare delivery. I think most of us are. And I think that my career, when I look at my career over the last 26 years and where I want to head to moving forward, I think one of the responsibilities that I have and all of us within the healthcare sector have is to leave the healthcare sector in a better place than when we inherited it. And And this, for me, is my way of being able to be part of that journey. And, you know, moving forward and where I see healthcare logic fitting into that journey is that there'll be corporate requirements that will come down from the government level and from the local level that we have to adhere to and we'll respond to those.

31:18We'll help people, you know, manage a mandate, increase in activity, you know, you keep performance indicator management, all those different things that we do within those local environments. but then it's taking that information and it's normal, like being able to normalize the process that this is about the patient and, and we're trying to make the patient's journey better. So it's taking that information and yes, we're talking about, you know, an ambulance offload time. Yep. We're talking about that, but we're doing it because we want the next person that calls triple O to have access to an ambulance service.

31:51We want the next person who is having a heart attack to be able to get into the cath lab in a time appropriate manner. We want the person who's waiting for a surgical procedure to not have to wait months, years for that surgical procedure. And that's why we're doing this. And that's the exciting part is to be able to get to the point in time where we can use this information to help find the efficiencies in the system. But the other really exciting part for me is that there's parts of this information that I never even knew or thought that I could use it for helping a patient's journey. I'll give an example.

32:23So I do a body of work here on the Gold Coast. And the story started where I had a patient come into the emergency department who works within this facility. He works within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait liaison team here. And he was going, oh, Brent, how long is it going to be until I can get out of here? I've got to get to work in the morning. And I said, give us a couple of minutes. I'll fast track it. I said, oh, what's the hurry? And he goes, oh, I've got to get into work tomorrow. I've got to download into an Excel spreadsheet some information for what my staff, where the workload is for my staff tomorrow, where all the patients are in the organisation right now who identify as Indigenous.

32:59Then I put that in a spreadsheet. I allocate that out to all my different staff. And I said, if I could automate that process, how much time would that give you back in your day? And he said, oh, about two and a half hours. And so we did that. We went on that journey and we were able to help him and his team to be able to identify that workload. And then from there, we've branched out into other things now where we're utilising that information to identify anyone who identifies as Indigenous coming towards our facility for a surgical procedure or for an outpatient's clinic. And we preemptively call them and we ensure cultural safety for that patient as they come towards our facility.

33:35So these are just examples of things that, you know, there's the face value ones here, 100%, depending on capacity management. There's, you know, all the new cool things in the world about command hubs and being able to access live data and information about the patient's journey from the front door to the back door. but there's these hidden gems in the information as well where we can make a massive difference to

33:55Peter Birch: that that patient's episode of care i like well said because i i think you know when you're working with the right partners you can you know i work on that particular problem at hand but then by getting deep in the weeds of it you start to pull a thread and other metaphors that all kind of just once you're in the doing of it you then realize how much more time you can can earn back and then work out where you can redeploy that time, which in the end achieves that purpose that we've all been talking about. So Chris, Brett, it's been wonderful chatting and looking forward to doing more within the THC Plus community.

34:28Peter Birch: There's a lot of information on our website about Healthcare Logic too with your listing there. So people can go and check that out. It's in the show notes of this episode. Brett, Chris, really appreciate your time. Thanks so much. Awesome. Thanks so much, Pete. Great to meet you. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Talking Health Tech. Make sure you like and subscribe and share this episode with someone who might find it valuable. For more information and resources about healthcare innovation, visit TalkingHealthTech.com.

35:00Peter Birch: That's it for this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter on TalkingHealthTech.com slash newsletter so you can be across all the things we do at Talking Health Tech above and beyond this humble little podcast. Thanks so much.