VIVA: NALHN's New Approach to Rehab in the Home
02 November 2022
As the old adage goes, "Necessity is the mother of invention".
There is an ever-increasing need for health services, particularly hospital services. Many are operating above full occupancy, with delays in discharge because of difficulty finding suitable community services and accommodation or a lack of alternatives for complex patients.
The Northern Adelaide Local Health Network (NALHN) catchment area has the fastest-growing population and the highest percentage of the most vulnerable people in SA.
The traditional solution has been to provide more hospital beds, but this requires long lag times and massive funding. This resource strain has encouraged creative and innovative thinking at NALHN about new ways to meet the demand.
The brown brick building at Smart Road, Modbury, which once housed a Bank SA branch, is now the nerve centre for NALHN's new Virtual In-home Virtual Assist (VIVA) platform, the State's first single out-of-hospital platform capable of managing all aspects of a patient's care journey, enabling patients in the north and northeast to receive integrated multi-disciplinary care at home.
Where once clinicians used multiple systems to monitor their patients at home or in residential aged care, VIVA offers a single integrated platform to monitor and deliver care, linked through the new purpose-built hub adjacent to the Modbury Hospital.
All aspects, from referral, triage, screening, assessment, care planning, and treatment, can be managed through the hub. In addition, the introduction of electronic records saves both paper and time. It allows attending clinicians to have all the up-to-date information required to deliver appropriate care.
Rehabilitation in the Home (RITH) patients are the initial beneficiaries of the program, which by year's end will be rolled out for Aged Care, Rehabilitation, and Palliative care patients.
As VIVA enables increased care in the home, it will reduce costs without compromising the high standards of care. In addition, it will ease the pressure on hospitals by providing better patient flows through the system.
NALHN is the best-performing Local Health Network in South Australia. It has substantial experience managing complex patients in an out-of-hospital, virtual care setting. Now it has a cutting-edge, next-generation platform to further that capability.