Datacom has signed an agreement to acquire a 20 per cent stake in the Australian health informatics company SmartWard.
Datacom is now also the exclusive supply and support organisation for the SmartWard solution in the region.
SmartWard is an Australian-developed software system that automates nursing records and manages nursing workflow, while improving quality of patient care. It also provides decision-support for doctors, nurses and other medical staff, increasing the time that they spend with patients, helping to reduce errors and assisting hospitals to manage overall costs.
“This team of Australian innovators has developed a unique software system that is keenly focused on improving health outcomes,” says Mark McWilliams, Director of Investments at Datacom. “We are looking forward to combining our organisational capability with SmartWard and working in unison to rapidly apply the benefits of their solution to address the needs of healthcare providers in our region.”
Datacom has also appointed Dr Keith Joe as Chief Medical Information Officer for its new business unit Datacom Healthcare Solutions.
“We now have an enterprise technology solution that understands and meets the workflow needs of clinicians, with inbuilt automation, quality and safety; and productively uses technology at the bedside to benefit the patient,” says Dr Joe.
“Dr Joe is well-known in the Australian and New Zealand healthcare sector with an outstanding background. He is a practising Emergency Physician, Founder and Director of the GeoHealth Directory and recent Clinical Director of the Australian Centre for Health Innovation. It’s a boon to bring his depth of experience to our solutions-focused drive into the healthcare sector,” says McWilliams.
Read more: Datacom reports ‘excellent performance’, appoints Theresa Eyssens as CEO for Australia
Clinical trials in 2013 at two campuses of Eastern Health in Melbourne, by Deakin University’s Centre for Clinical Nursing Research, found that SmartWard reduced the amount of time that nurses spent on documentation, and freed them up to perform more high-value tasks such as spending time with patients.
Specifically, nurses increased the proportion of time spent at patient bedsides from 32.8 per cent to 48.1 per cent, and increased the amount of time spent interacting with patients from 7.9 per cent to 23.6 per cent. These improvements have massive implications across the healthcare sector, Datacom says in a statement.
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