A new tool to improve hospital communication, collaboration and reporting is being developed thanks to recent project funding supported by Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre, the Monash Institute of Medical Engineering (MIME), and the Monash Young MedTech Innovators (MYMI).
The project is a collaboration between Monash Partners, the Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation (MCHRI) and Monash Health that will see a centralised database system established to search, find and track the many innovation and improvement projects occurring across wards and hospitals at any given time.
Research lead and Project Chief Executive, Dr Angela Melder said this initiative was long overdue with no channels specifically set up to support communication about projects across different departments within a health service currently available.
“With many quality improvement projects occurring within our hospital system, it becomes unavoidable that projects with similar intentions and methodology arise independently from various departments,” said Dr Melder.
“With no dedicated channel for communication, this results in a duplication of efforts on the same tasks giving rise to inefficiencies within the hospital system due to healthcare staff inadvertently ‘reinventing the wheel’, leading to potentially valuable hours wasted,” said Dr Melder.
To address this will be a cloud-based solution, named “Meta QI”, supported by MCHRI IT, that is easy to access, intuitive, and specifically tailored to the needs of clinicians, health service management improvement leads, and healthcare administration employees in all participating hospitals.The new tool will help health service staff to connect, collaborate, learn from each other and scale up what works.
“It will incorporate data storage, search and visualisation functions, as well as basic reporting and moderating capabilities,” said Dr Melder.
“It is a solution that is usable, valuable and sustainable with capacity for scale-up to facilitate and support a learning health system.
“Implementation of MetaQI is expected to provide important opportunities for information sharing and increased awareness of innovation of improvement work across the Monash Partners network,” said Dr Melder.
This project was made possible thanks to the HealthCare Innovation Summer Scholarships (HISS) Program, supported by Monash Partners Academic Health Science Centre, the Monash Institute of Medical Engineering (MIME), and the Monash Young MedTech Innovators (MYMI).
