In July 2019, the innovation team at Cabrini Technology Group received grant funding from Telematics Trust for the design and development of a tablet-based app designed to provide educational materials, support, and patient reported outcome questionnaires to patients with respiratory conditions.
This project was a collaboration with the Victorian State-wide Equipment Program (SWEP) and was expected to be rolled out to 50 of their patients in the form of a pilot, all of whom are recipients of domiciliary oxygen therapy equipment and support in their home.
The app had been designed and built and was weeks away from its first user testing. 50 tablets had been unboxed, configured and charged, ready to have the TeleO2 app loaded before they were to be delivered to and set up in the homes of patients by our team of engineers.
Then came the pandemic.
Victoria endured six lockdowns over the course of the 18 months that would follow, and quite early into the pandemic it became clear that there was no conceivable way that the project could proceed with the original plan to visit the homes of patients with respiratory conditions (to setup the hardware, provide training, etc.), without risking the health and safety of both patients and staff.
After many months, the pandemic showed no signs of wavering and ultimately led the project team to formally request approval from Telematics Trust to pivot the project to a new format that would eliminate any such possible risk associated with the delivery and onsite setup of a digital tool to the cohort of vulnerable oxygen therapy recipients in the community.
Instead of issuing hardware to 50 patients and giving them access to tools that would allow them to report on outcomes and view materials, we sought to engage all SWEP patients using a remote patient reported outcome platform that would work on the patients’ own personal device, allowing for instantaneous reporting of their outcomes and experiences.
This was to be achieved via the delivery of a hyperlink contained within an SMS which then directed the patient to a web app where they could provide valuable insights about their treatment, care, health outcomes and overall experience. This requested amendment had the full support of SWEP and was subsequently approved by Telematics Trust.
Even though the grant funding had been expended to deliver the original project (version 1.0 that never eventuated), the innovation team persisted and were able to deliver the alternative project. The costs for which were covered by Cabrini Technology Group. This was achieved by leveraging a product that was being built by Cabrini Technology in parallel to TeleO2, called eCaptis – a secure medical grade cloud-based software tool that has been designed specifically to capture and report Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) simply and seamlessly.
The pilot, in its new format, ran for a period of 9 months and captured information from 120+ patients in real time, and yielded some valuable insights and results. It proved to be an effective tool with respect to response rates and was deemed to be far more efficient than the existing manual process.
The platform was then utilised over an extended period beyond the pilot as it continued to deliver cost savings and efficiencies.
The pandemic prompted the project team and our partners to rethink the way we digitally engage with patients in the course of delivering them treatment, care, equipment, educational materials and consumables.
We’d like to thank Telematics Trust for making this project possible and the State-wide Equipment Program (SWEP) for making it a success.
You can learn more about Telematics Trust here: https://telematics.org.au/
