Catholic Healthcare

Catholic Healthcare’s (CHL) passion to improve the way we provide care for our residents and drive operational efficiencies for our staff led to identifying HoloLens 2 as a preferred solution to provide timely access to medical services as a response to COVID-19 and other infectious outbreaks.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in extensive disruptions and periods of restrictions, often lockdowns, for aged care homes which has impacted delivery of allied health specialist services to residents. One of the biggest impacts on resident wellbeing was the restricted movement of medical practitioners and their ability to attend to face-to-face consultations with residents. A lack of access to specialist services plus longer wait times for health appointments contributed to deterioration in residents’ health and put immense pressure on frontline staff to deliver adequate clinical care.

Whilst the rollout of telehealth by the government solved the absence of face-to-face appointments, medical practitioners were still limited by only having verbal information provided by registered nurses over the phone. When video conferencing was introduced, challenges experienced included lack of staff competency to focus the devices as well as RNs ability to assist with the clinical assessment while holding the device.

Hololens 2 is a 3D headset that generates life-emulating holograms in physical space.

Unique benefits of HoloLens

• HoloLens is an untethered, fully self-contained Windows 10 computer that rests comfortably on your head.

• HoloLens 2, through its multiple cameras and eye tracking, understands precisely where you’re looking to create a seamless virtual digital experience.

“HoloLens has demonstrated superior quality and is a pioneer for innovation within Australian Aged Care. The sound and video quality are far beyond using a mobile phone that will often have poor reception. The walk through and review process for outbreak management setup was quick, efficient and user friendly.” 

The IT team worked collaboratively with our Clinical & Safe Care department to identify what a successful telehealth solution needs to comprise of. This included:

• Aged Care Quality Standard requirements, including resident involvement in the consult.

• Co-designing with General Practitioner’s and other Medical Professionals around changes in residents’ health conditions to trigger a telehealth consult.

• Staff education and engagement to ensure staff know how to use this technology.

• Participating in webinars hosted by primary health networks (PHNs) to advocate the benefits of using HoloLens 2 for telehealth to other aged care providers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic many CHL residential aged care homes experienced an infectious outbreak. The process for managing infectious outbreaks is extremely intricate as explained below, I use this opportunity to coach and mentor as well as ensure that the homes have followed the outbreak management set up in line with both public health and CHL policy. Since, I cannot travel to multiple homes to review the outbreak management set up, HoloLens 2 has made this process simpler and easier for me.

• CHL follows a risk-based approach to managing infectious outbreaks. This means restrictions are applied to the affected wings where infected residents live rather than the whole of home approach that was in place early in the COVID-19 pandemic.

• The Manager for Infection Prevention & Control (I) will conduct an internal Outbreak Management Team meeting with the frontline staff via Microsoft Teams and runs through all outbreak protocols providing advice and support to manage each individual home and scenario.

• The CHL Outbreak Management Team (OMT) includes a walk-through of the home to ensure PPE is set up, and zones are correct. This helps ensure that we are managing and preventing the outbreak for spreading to other areas proactively.

• The walk through before using HoloLens 2 was conducted using Mobile Phone camera and is often difficult as user tries to show the home with camera reversed and a substantial amount of time gets wasted trying to focus on the right location. These inefficiencies were eliminated by HoloLens 2, and it created an improved experience for me, when conducting the Outbreak management set up review.