CIO Interview: Plunket’s digital journey

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Richard Ashworth, chief technology and innovation officer at Royal New Zealand Plunket Trust

Telehealth is one part of Plunket’s overall client-centric digital solution that aims to bring increased services to families and whānau through digital tools. These tools help the organisation focus its resources on those that need help the most.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way that many of us reach our clients. Telehealth has become a much bigger part of service delivery for many organisations and has been a lifeline for many New Zealanders. I have read a number of uplifting and inspiring articles on the increased use of telehealth during the pandemic, and how that’s becoming a business-as-usual function for healthcare providers. 

Whānau Āwhina Plunket has also been on this journey, although for longer than most - we have been operating PlunketLine since 1994 and have been successfully using video conferencing technologies to support parents since 2017. 

Telehealth and transformation

Even so, during the first COVID-19 lockdown, we needed to transform how our PlunketLine service delivered to our clients. We needed to do this for the safety of our staff, and to ensure that the service could run regardless of what the pandemic threw at it. 

We were able to move from our legacy phone and contact centre system to a cloud-based contact centre system in a matter of days, speaking volumes about how modern infrastructures can enable businesses to change and adapt rapidly. Now our PlunketLine nurses can, and do, work from just about anywhere. 

To the Plunket team, telehealth is just one part of an overall client-centric digital solution. We know that telehealth alone won’t provide the solutions that our clients are looking for. We know that getting things right in the first 1000 days of a child's life will set them up for better outcomes later in life, so we want to help parents understand what is happening, what to prepare for, and how to get help – proactively and based on the wealth of information we hold about the families and whānau we deal with. 

That’s why we are working hard to bring increased services to families and whānau through digital tools, including enabling families to not only see the full health picture of their Plunket visits, clinics and their interactions with us through PlunketLine, but also the community-based support, wellbeing and education interactions that they have with us. 

We are working not only to enable these capabilities, but also to engage our clients in an ongoing, digitally-enabled conversation, providing families and whānau with proactive, relevant and timely advice, guidance and tips from Plunket and from other service providers and information sources. 

Improving equity

These improved digital services will also help Plunket to achieve one of its key goals of improving the equity of health outcomes for Māori and Pasifika. In a health context, the World Health Organisation describes equity as "the absence of avoidable or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically”.  It’s incumbent upon us to ensure that we do what we can to remove those inequities in the first 1000 days, and telehealth and digital tools play an important role in this work. 

Digital tools will not only deliver services at a time and place that is convenient to families and whānau, but will also help us to focus our resources on those that need the help the most by enabling all of our clients to access services and information digitally. For some families, engaging with Whānau Āwhina Plunket solely through our digital service may provide them with everything they need, which will enable our workforce to spend more time with families and whānau that need more support. 

The importance of partnerships

One of the key challenges for Whānau Āwhina Plunket is that when we think about being client-centric with our digital offerings, we need to look beyond our own services, because we know that a parent’s journey neither starts nor ends with Plunket. 

We are already working with the College of Midwives to make the transition of data as easy as the ‘real world’ transition of care from a midwife to Plunket. This helps us to know the families and whānau before we engage with them and enables us to spend our early days understanding them and building trust and confidence, rather than gathering information. 

We also work closely with HealthLine to ensure a seamless service for parents of young children, regardless of which 0800 number they call. Of course, working with other organisations presents new challenges, as we have to align goals, outcomes and priorities as well as rectifying data and technology issues. 

Realising digital ambitions

Another key challenge for Plunket is that it is an NGO, so we really have to get the most we can from our limited resources and funding. It often surprises people to be told that, although we deliver key WellChild services to around 85% of New Zealand’s children, we receive no capital funding from the health system and need to work with philanthropic organisations and individuals to realise our digital ambitions. 

We know we can’t do all we want to do alone, but digital technologies offer incredible scope for organisations that care about the first 1000 days to work together and achieve. We’ll be actively looking for ways to create a great digital experience for our clients, to drive toward equitable health outcomes, and seeking to work with others in the health sector to make this happen. It’s a big challenge but one we are embracing. 

Richard Ashworth is chief technology and innovation officer at Royal New Zealand Plunket Trust

If you want to contact eHealthNews.nz regarding this View, please email the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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CIO Interview: Technology as an enabler during a pandemic
CIO Interview: The mahi starts now

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