Clinicians' Challenge winner aims to break language barrier
It's tough enough being a patient with a life-threatening condition, but imagine not being able to communicate with the clinicians caring for you.
The plight of seriously ill patients who don't speak English was what spurred Waitemata DHB intensive care specialist Janet Liang to enter and eventually win this year's Clinicians' Challenge.
"Communicating to different ethnicities and across cultures can be challenging enough at the best of times. The situation can be particularly difficult when the patient is in the emergency department and so sick we need information faster than we can get hold of an interpreter."
The Clinicians' Challenge asks health professionals to put forward a 'real-life' problem that could be solved by the innovative use of information technology.
Dr Liang highlighted the need for a portable language interpreter system that can deal with clinical and colloquial terms. "Urgent questions about the patient’s medical history should be worded in a way the average person in the street can understand, and lead to a simple ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’ answer." There's currently nothing on the market that fills this brief, she says. Dr Liang also suggests diagrams or videos are added.
Other clinicians have expressed an interest in any solution she's part of but so far no vendor has come up with one, although she has had conversations with several developers.
Clinicians' Challenge winners were announced at the recent Health Informations New Zealand (HINZ) conference in Auckland. Fifty-six clinicians put forward a 'real-life' problem, with three of these chosen as the ‘best’ problems and then publicised to the vendor community.
The winning vendor proposal was from Healthlink, Kinross Group and Corinne Gower of Maxsys, who came up with a solution to electronically notify legally reportable conditions to Medical Officers of Health.
Corinne Gower says the challenge was an opportunity to say “hey, you’ve got this need, and we think we can help you with a solution.”
"In our case the solution is a kitset. Our solution is about showing the sector how to create the solution they want with some base materials. Enabling interoperability between public health units, ESR and primary care is a huge undertaking and one which would have enormous benefits for all New Zealanders, particularly if we get another pandemic."
While there are no guarantees the work will go ahead, she says, as a group of vendors they enjoyed the experience of working together and talking to Hawke's Bay DHB Public Health Physician Nick Jones and Medical Officers of Health.
"I can’t help thinking that an earlier notification system and smarter interconnectivity between systems such as the National Immunisation Register would make a real difference to this important area of health. Let's hope the time to meet this challenge has come!"
The Clinicians' Challenge is a joint collaboration between HINZ, the New Zealand Health IT Cluster and the National Health IT Board. The Ministry of Science and Innovation also provided sponsorship towards the vendor prize.
See this article in the December Towards 2014 newsletter
