Virtual Care

The Virtual Care Clinical Academic Group (CAG) aims to enhance virtual care across Sydney Health Partners organisations. As we move beyond the pandemic, the CAG is focused on demonstrating the value of virtual care and undertaking real-time translational research to support the rollout of evidence-based care across Sydney Health Partners acute and chronic disease services.

Join the CAG

About the CAG

The CAG brings together clinical and managerial leads from Sydney Local Health District Virtual Hospital, Northern Sydney Virtual Care and Hospital in the Home Services, Western Sydney Local Health District, Western Virtual at Western NSW Local Health District and Sydney Children’s Hospital Network’s VirtualKIDS, complemented by academic leaders in digital health, human factors and health economics, to inform translational research and share learnings across Sydney Health Partners.

CAG Objectives

Support scoping of virtual care implementation across Sydney Health Partners acute and chronic disease services
Deliver a health economic evaluation framework for virtual care services to support consistent evaluation of virtual care from service, clinician and consumer perspectives
Facilitate an evidence-based approach to virtual care by supporting the development of grant and funding applications
Share learnings from implementation research projects and virtual care services
Work with external stakeholders, including NSW Health and industry, to foster collaborative research and capacity-building

GET INVOLVED

Interested in finding out more about the Virtual Care CAG or joining?

Join the CAG Get in touch

Projects and Initiatives

Led by Prof. Tim Shaw

Objectives:

Identify evidence-practice gaps in virtual care through literature review, interviews and surveys of stakeholders and thought leaders.
Present the findings of a gap analysis to stakeholders and seek feedback about the relevance of the evidence-practice gaps to their local services.
Utilise an established set of criteria in a priority setting activity to identify stakeholders’ priority for implementation research that will address an evidence-practice gap.

Led by A/Prof. Liliana Laranjo

Objectives:

Explore the perspectives of stakeholders involved in GP advice lines delivered by virtual care services across Sydney Health Partners to support coordinated remote patient management in primary care.

Led by A/Prof Philip Haywood

Objectives:

Leverage existing Australian tools to build an evaluation framework for virtual care services.
Build capacity across university research groups to deliver a cost-benefit analysis of virtual care services across Sydney Health Partners.
Full text review being undertaken of existing literature into health economic evaluations of virtual models of care internationally.

Objectives:

Gather information on virtual models of care including implementation, governance, evaluation and workforce arrangements across Sydney Health Partners acute and chronic disease services.
Learnings from this audit will be used to prepare evidence-based guidelines on developing and implementing virtual models of care either as a standalone service or distributed across acute services.

Led by Dr Adeola Bamgboje-Ayodele and Dr Jagdev Singh

Objectives:

Map access points and the care pathways that will lie behind the digital front doors planned in NSW.
Engage patients and carers to understand their expectations of digital front doors and barriers and enablers to utilise digital front doors for urgent and non-urgent care.
Evaluate the impact of existing digital front door educational resources that have been developed by SCHN on the understanding of patients and their carers.

Are you someone who has presented to the emergency department recently? Get in touch with the CAG to see if you are eligible to take part!

Milestones

Successful completion of three priority-setting exercises
Support multiple competitive grant applications focusing on implementation and translational research identified in our priority-setting exercise
Establish a national conversation about clinical-academic partnerships in virtual care around Australia
Expand CAG representation to encompass regional and rural voices

What’s next

Explore consumer perspectives on virtual care
Understand costs and benefits linked to virtual models of care
Establish a virtual care network led by early and mid-career researchers

Join the Virtual Care CAG

Be part of a collaborative network driving research that makes a real difference to virtual care.

We welcome clinicians, researchers, policy makers, and consumers with an interest in enhancing virtual care. Whether you’re early in your career or an established leader, your voice adds value.

Join the CAG Get In Touch

Why join

Collaborate on high-impact, translational research
Access mentoring, training and funding opportunities
Influence research priorities and co-design meaningful studies
Contribute to better outcomes through evidence-informed policy and practice

Publications

Conducting a Priority-Setting Exercise

Barriers, facilitators and next steps for sustaining and scaling virtual hospital services in Australia: a qualitative descriptive study

Understand key facilitators, barriers, evidence-practice gaps and next steps for scaling virtual hospitals.

Defining a core set of research and development priorities for virtual care in the post‐pandemic environment: a call to action

Our ‘Call to Action’ and translational research agenda for virtual care based on our priority-setting exercises.

Publications

Evaluating Virtual Models of Care

How primary and tertiary care services collaborate in urgent care delivery: an evaluation of general practice advice lines

Understand how uptake and use of GP advice lines could be supported and sustained.

Systematic review of impacts of virtual care services for future evaluation and monitoring

A protocol for a cost-benefit analysis of virtual models of care to inform future health economic evaluations.

What’s new?

Successful Grant Applications

Dr Adeola Bamgboje-Ayodele and Dr Jagdev Singh

Awarded a Sydney Health Partners’ Pilot Implementation Grant to explore community perspectives on the single front door program led by HealthDirect and NSW Health.

Dr Owen Hutchings

Dr Owen Hutchings will lead a multi-disciplinary team in co-designing a virtual care pathway for Aboriginal patients presenting to emergency departments in regional and rural NSW. A story of success from Round 7 of the Translational Research Grant Scheme.

What’s new?

Virtual Care Reading List

Virtual Care Strategy

Sydney Local Health District Virtual Hospital has released their new virtual care strategy that will establish the ground-breaking virtual hospital as a new Centre of Excellence in Virtual Care.