Graduate Certificate in Digital Health opens opportunities

Kate Bailey has taken on the challenge of  studying while working multiple jobs during the height of the pandemic. She says it has paid off and is looking forward to beginning a career in digital health.

She carved out some time to talk to us about why she decided to study and how she sees digital health shaping her career path.

Kate is still working as an Occupational Therapist but also works as an emergency department care co-ordinator at the Austin and as a Covid Care Navigator at Eastern Health. In looking to study she was keen to be enable change and improve outcomes for both clinicians and patients.

Keen and a little frustrated with the Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems she had been using and knowing that the projects she had been involved with needed quality management, her mind turned to digital health as a field that sparked her interest. She felt that study in this area could give her the skills to make other clinicians life better, improve communication and patient outcomes.

We talked over zoom and she told us -

I am now able to consider a project and set it up with a view on the future with greater chance for success and sustainability. Putting the time in upfront to design it so that is robust and take into consideration the future needs particularly from a data perspective. How should we collect the data and format it and really make it helpful.

I especially enjoyed learning about data and categorising things to make sure we have consistent and streamlined data. Often in health records there can be lots of inconsistency and abbreviations which nobody knows what they mean! The same information is often gathered by mutiple people in the patient’s journey but it’s all over the place and it makes it very difficult if not impossible to use.

I’m just about to start a new role in a quality position in an EMR team, so I will get to use my new approach and learning in my day to day role. I’ve proposed a project on emergency triage making sure we have the right information from the get go. Having that information follow the patient from the start and building on that throughout the patient’s stay. It’s my first digital health role and I feel that without having done the course I wouldn’t be making this change. I have learnt many useful things in this course to apply straight away to my roles as a healthcare professional also.

Just doing the course, I’ve met so many like minded people. It really extended my network and even though it was mostly online learning through covid, I’ve made good connections. It’s exciting to have a group of people working toward similar goals. It’s been a big bonus. The course is quite small and not many people know about it. I say it’s about using technology and data to improve healthcare and then people understand it.

I don’t remember learning about data when I did my first degree, before we had the option to do notes electronically. I doubt if anybody will ever get to use the data I gathered for all those years. Those scanned records will likely never see the light of day.

I think we can reduce the time taken for both clinicians and patients if we do data collection well. The patient says I’ve told you this multiple times. It would be comforting for patients to know that they have  been listened to and it’s been recorded and communicated well.

I was really happy with the range of learning in the course, I think all of the course was really good. We looked at digital health and where it’s come from, how people shared information and then how the data and communication has improved. We’ve looked at the research for health informatics and how to conduct the research ourselves. There was lots of small group learning – a bit like a multi-disciplinary team. There have been mistakes in health projects because health people haven’t been involved. I now feel I can really contribute to a project and understand how I can add value to it and make it a success.

Sometimes I was out of my comfort zone but it was enjoyable to learn new things and I’m sure it will come up again. It was great to work co-operatively in a team and it mimics how I work day to day.

Contributing to the Digital Health Capability Framework for Allied Health Professionals on a working group really  gave me a taste for going deeper into digital health and spurred me on to take on the Grad Cert in Digital Health.

So now I see my future in quality improvement and digital health and it’s a really exciting time.