Digital Health Summary for Aged Care Hospital Transfers - Implementation Package

This rep[ort is in the form of an implementation package that provides practical, evidence-based guidance to support the adoption and scale-up of a co-designed Digital Health Summary that enables secure sharing of critical health information during emergency hospital transfers of people living in Residential Aged Care (RAC). The Digital Health Summary supports information sharing between aged care, hospitals, general practice, ambulance services, as well as residents and their families. The presented work is the result of a four-year research project funded by the Commonwealth Government’s Medical Research Futures Fund (PHRDI000008) and led by the NCHA, a partnership between Peninsula Health and Monash University. The Digital Health Summary was co-designed, feasibility tested and evaluated in partnership with RAC providers, aged care residents, carers/family members, hospital staff, ambulance paramedics and General Practitioners (GPs). It addresses a longstanding gap in care continuity by ensuring that important to know about health information of aged care residents, such as usual health status, medications, precautions and advance care preferences, are reliably available and shared at the point of hospital transfer and discharge back to RAC. This resource includes an overview of the Digital Health Summary, technical implementation and specifications, data management, clinical implementation strategies, and recommendations for future scale-up.