University of Queensland student, and DHCRC scholarship recipient, Sophie Macklin, has had her research published in the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.
The paper, The Flow of Healthcare Information in Rural and Remote Settings: A Qualitative Approach, looks at the persistent challenges in rural and remote healthcare including fragmented use of digital systems, interoperability inefficiencies and workforce capabilities.
Sophie started her journey in Biomedical Science, looking for a degree that helps people and a natural curiosity of how things work. She stumbled on Digital Health at a research evening at UQ, where she met Senior Research Fellow at the Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC), and now co-author, Dr Lee Woods.
In starting her Honours, Sophie wanted to solve a real-world issue and went to eHealth Queensland to ask what research they would find useful. They pointed her to rural and remote healthcare and cited the need to map the journey of consumer healthcare information between services, including where it works well and where the issues are, especially because those settings were still largely paper-based.
Involving interviews with over 50 healthcare staff from 6 rural and remote healthcare systems, Sophie found: a disparity of clinical information systems used, making it challenging to piece together a consumer journey; healthcare information still largely paper-based; and challenges in access and staff training on ICT infrastructure.
The research paper provides three recommendations, which Sophie presented back to eHealth Queensland:
- Expand use of digital health information exchange applications to improve access
- Increase ICT infrastructure support and funding
- Develop a digitally skilled workforce
Support from the Digital Health CRC, along with the Northern Australia CRC, gave Sophie the funding to publish her work as well as the opportunity to present her findings at the 2022 Digital Health Summit in Sydney, providing the opportunity to present her research at a much larger scale.
Sophie isn’t stopping now. She has commenced her PhD, building on this foundation and adding a more human perspective she felt was missing from her earlier study. She is now looking at exploring how digital health can enable patient-centred care in rural and remote settings, with a stronger focus on consumers, alongside healthcare providers and health service leaders.
You can read Sophie’s Honours paper here.
