On the 16th of June, the RNSH REDCap Administrator was invited to the NSW ACI Telehealth Managers collaborative monthly teleconference to discuss the technical aspects of the telehealth REDCap feedback surveys that have been implemented at NSLHD.
Context: At the beginning of this year (2020) the rollout of the My Virtual Care telehealth platform across NSLHD was expedited as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. To evaluate the implementation of this platform ACI developed a telehealth feedback survey administered through Survey Monkey.
Due to the limitations of Survey Monkey, access to survey responses was restricted to ACI and individual implementation sites within NSW were not able to access the telehealth survey responses for their own respective sites. As a result of this limitation, reporting of feedback results back to hospital and Local Health District Executive was difficult.
The NSLHD Telehealth Project Officer together with the RNSH SERT Institute REDCap Administrator created an alternative feedback survey that would facilitate reporting at the local district level and provide greater oversight of survey data. Two telehealth feedback surveys were created on the RNSH REDCap platform; the first survey was for the Ambulatory Care Unit only and the second survey was for application across 40 different telehealth sites withinNSLHD.
As the second survey was applied to multiple sites it was created with the capability of automatically identifying the site of survey respondents. This was achieved by automatically populating a hidden survey question that captured the clinic name using distinct survey links for each clinic. Using this same hidden question respondents were then allocated to a corresponding group in REDCap. The security and data access group function of REDCap also ensured that clinic staff were only able to access the telehealth feedback for their respective clinic/s.
Aside from providing individual clinics access to their own specific feedback, REDCap allows real-time data to be readily available to hospital and district executives through the statistics and charts function (sample below), which was not available via the initial platform used – Survey Monkey.
Given the capabilities of and results provided by the NSLHD Telehealth Feedback Survey through REDCap, other Telehealth sites across NSW were given the green light to move away from the survey developed in Survey Monkey in preference to developing their own survey data on a REDCap platform.
The benefits of REDCap and the support requirements (which are minimal once a project is established) were further discussed in the meeting including the ability to directly copy projects, which in this instance is highly relevant. NSLHD will provide a copy of the locally developed Telehealth Feedback Survey template to ACI for other LHDs to use. In the meeting, it was identified that not all LHDs have access to REDCap and to address that issue ACI will be exploring the possibility of supporting those LHDs by providing access to the ACI REDCap server.
The next action for NSW ACI Telehealth Managers collaborative was to reach a consensus for standardised
telehealth feedback questions that each LHD would include, in order to be able to collate results across the state.
In addition, the RNSH REDCap Administrator has agreed to provide technical advice to both ACI and other NSW LHD’s if required to support the development of the survey material [See Attached Report].