Perth, Western Australia – In a significant move towards enhancing patient care, South Metropolitan Health Service (SMHS) has embarked on the digitization of its LifeFit-SurgFit Program, three years post its initiation. The health service recently awarded a tender to Personify Care, entrusting them with the provision, hosting, and ongoing support of a Software as a Service (SaaS) application integral to the LifeFit-SurgFit initiative.
The adopted solution, outlined in the tender, enables patients to complete health questionnaires and provides continuous assistance throughout their surgical journey. The overarching goal is to ensure patients are both physically prepared for surgery and equipped for a healthy post-operative life, achieved through early screening and personalized patient pathways.
SMHS, a provider of hospital and community-based public health care services in southern metropolitan Perth, launched the LifeFit SurgFit Program in 2020-2021 as a holistic approach to prepare patients for surgery. A spokesperson for the organization highlighted that patients receive comprehensive support from a multidisciplinary team, offering health and well-being tools to integrate into their daily lives. The initiative began with ENT head and neck surgery patients, later extending to upper gastrointestinal and colorectal surgery patients, albeit initially lacking a digital platform.
Choosing Personify Care’s digital solution was influenced by the company’s proven track record in delivering prehabilitation, pre-surgical, and post-discharge pathways across other Australian tertiary public health services. Despite facing a cyber attack last year, the spokesperson noted that the digital pathways provided by Personify Care met SMHS’s cybersecurity requirements during a proof of concept demonstration. Moreover, the platform has received certification with ISO 27001:2022, the highest standard for enterprise information security.
Looking ahead, the spokesperson mentioned that if successfully validated in the LifeFit SurgFit program, Personify Care’s platform may extend to other clinical pathways, including non-surgical ones such as endoscopy.
In a statement, the SMHS spokesperson expressed the significance of delivering this model of care through digital patient pathways. The aim is to increase program accessibility to more patients across SMHS while providing the multidisciplinary team with early visibility into key clinical indicators necessary for delivering targeted patient pathways.
