Telstra Health’s Communicare is enabling a more streamlined patient journey at ATSICHS Mackay

Telstra Health has completed the rollout of Communicare at Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Community Health Service (ATSICHS) Mackay Ltd, enabling safe, seamless access to healthcare data through one platform.

ATSICHS provides holistic healthcare to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in the regional town of Mackay and the surrounding areas. The organisation works in partnership with regional community health and other service providers to ensure the services it provides, including child mental health, chronic disease, allied health, National Disability Insurance Scheme, justice and primary care services among many others, are appropriate and accessible for the regional communities it supports.

Communicare supports healthcare teams at ATSICHS by providing access to accurate patient data and to view a true representation of each patient’s care journey, which had previously been an ongoing challenge and had led to delays and inefficiencies across the organisation.

The Communicare solution supports funding-based reporting, which means the team can easily provide accurate reports to government and other funding bodies as required.

Valerie Pitcher, Executive Manager at ATSICHS, said, “Communicare was set up to address some of the health inequalities in our Mob and our community.”

“It’s going to assist not just our GPs but our healthcare workers and nurses right across the board.

“The solution will mean less pressure across the whole organisation to access accurate data in real time. We also like the idea that it’s going to assist us with Medicare. We rely heavily on Medicare for our funding so it’s really important that we are claiming everything.”

Communicare is Australia’s leading healthcare software for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander healthcare organisations, which regularly deal with complex care needs in Indigenous and remote communities. The highly-configurable digital health solution helps to provide transparency across care plans, patient appointments, and the health status of patients.

Commenting on training delivered by Telstra Health to healthcare professionals at ATSICHS, Leanne Bellamy, Senior Health Practitioner at ATSICHS, said,
“The Communicare team came here (to Mackay) for about a week and a half, and sat with us and gave us the training to kick off and go live with Communicare. It was really good – our health workers were able to go straight in and use the product. Transitioning to Communicare is upgrading us to modern times.”

Through Communicare, healthcare workers at ATSICHS Mackay can access comprehensive, up to date patient records for providing more timely, efficient and effective healthcare.

Dr Joanna Marie Chu, GP Registrar at ATSICHS, said, “Communicare provides simple access to multi-source imports, enabling us to export all of the documents that we normally wouldn’t be able to export in one go. Through Communicare, we can get a hold of a patient’s full care journey on one page and can print off everything a patient may need to have.”