Gold Coast Health, a public health service in Queensland, recently introduced a new digital door for chronic disease patients.
The General Medicine Rapid Access Service (G-RAS) provides an alternative route to patient management. By scanning the QR code to take home, patients can contact the doctor for follow-up through secure two-way messaging and voice or video calls.
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
GCH provides a range of secondary and tertiary health services to approximately 700,000 people at more than 20 health facilities across the Gold Coast region.
To relieve some of the pressure from their busy emergency department, they launched G-RAS with the help of Foxo, a medical communications technology provider.
“Foxo’s Patient Connectivity Platform provides patients with chronic and acute illnesses a secure communication channel to connect with their clinicians. Foxo specializes in secure clinical communications across the medical industry economics, making it the right partner for the purpose [our] G-RAS service”, a GCH spokesperson explains this partnership to Healthcare IT news.
The service runs on Foxo’s Patient Connectivity Platform, which enables what they call “unified communications”; it is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Teams, allowing care teams to invite their patients into the MS Teams environment, even without an existing account there.
“Patients with chronic and acute illnesses may need ongoing support for symptom management and monitoring. In the past, patients with changing symptoms often went to the emergency room for advice. Translation The G-RAS service allows these patients to securely connect with their clinicians to receive care virtually, reducing avoidable ED presentations.”
Additionally, the platform integrates with GCH’s EMR system, ensuring secure and fast access to important patient information.
A GCH spokesperson shared that they expect the digitally enabled G-RAS to help reduce up to 2,000 unplanned ED presentations per year.
ON PROFILE
Sandip Kumar, chief executive of Strategy, said: “Through the integration of Foxo’s end-to-end communications platform, our health service remains at the forefront of care delivery and access modern health. Our focus on improving patient access and reducing emergency room visits underscores our commitment to improving health care outcomes.” , Transformation and Major Capital at GCH said in a media release.
