A special panel session on insights and opportunities in healthcare in the Asia Pacific has been added to the Future Health Summit being held in Dublin at the end of the month, including a presentation on the use of a cloud digital medical record – and some innovative Irish solutions – in a new private hospital in Australia.

Paul Gladwell, ICT project manager for the $A75 million (€46m) Adeney Private Hospital being built in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, will discuss the selection of a cloud-enabled digital medical record (DMR) for the hospital, which opens later this year.

Adeney Private has strong links to Ireland: it is the first hospital in the Asia-Pacific region to implement the full suite of MEG quality management systems for patient care, and fellow Irish vendor Oneview Healthcare will also implement its patient infotainment system and allow patients to provide feedback from their beds.

Mr Gladwell is a former head of business technology for Mercy Health Australia and ICT strategy manager for St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne.

The 30-bed short-stay hospital is a joint venture between a 42-strong group of specialist doctors and health insurer Medibank’s Amplar Health business.

It aims to provide high-quality, affordable healthcare and will not charge insured patients any out of pocket expenses across all specialities, which include plastics, gastroenterology, general surgery, ENT, orthopaedics services, vascular, urology, anaesthetics, oncology, and radiology.

It has an innovative, short stay model of care with both the prehab and rehab care delivered outside the hospital, providing continuity for patients when they are discharged.

A KPMG report commissioned by Medibank recently found that short stay models of care reduced the length of stay for hip and knee replacements by 50 per cent. Broad adoption of the short stay program across the health system could save 217,000 bed days in 2030, it found.

Adeney Private CEO Louise O’Connor said the DMR vendor InfoMedix was chosen as it was “the only DMR that had truly been co-designed with clinicians”.

“The platform is a key component of Adeney’s plan for innovative clinical and financial solutions that will extend beyond the four walls of the hospital,” Ms O’Connor said.

InfoMedix is widely used in Australia as a scanned medical record, but the platform has since transitioned into a fully digital platform powered by the AWS cloud since it came under new ownership in 2018.

The InfoMedix DMR has been rolled out by a number of St John of God hospitals in Victoria and Western Australia and will be implemented by UnitingCare Queensland (UCQ) in three hospitals this year. InfoMedix software is used by over 70 hospitals in Australia.

The Future Health Summit is being held at the Dublin Royal Convention Centre on May 29 and 30. Tickets are still available.