CIO Interview: The IT Roadshow

VIEW - Grant Taylor, Whakarongorau Aotearoa - New Zealand Telehealth Services

A major roll out of new technology will see almost 300 Healthline nurses and Mental Health staff who work from their home offices providing free to the public virtual health mental health and social services receive new desktop equipment over the next six to eight weeks.

The Kaitaia to Bluff ‘IT Roadie’ begins this week, with two vans driven by our IT technicians visiting up to ten staff each day in their homes.

We’ve been planning this upgrade for a while, but pressed the pause button when COVID-19 hit last year. It’s good to be getting things moving now because digital technology, and how we use it to engage with our service users, is really critical. It’s what we do, and it needs to be robust.

We are retiring the old thin client technology used by staff working remotely and replacing it with a new, managed desktop. It should improve the experience by being better performing and more secure. There’s also a business continuity plan in place for voice now, using Microsoft Teams.

Over time, some of the manual data gathering work will be automated, meaning staff will have more time to respond to incoming calls from the public. This new technology gives us plenty of options to improve the experience of our service users safely and will ultimately improve how we engage with them.

More than a hardware swap out
We knew from the get-go that this was an opportunity to meet our hard-working work-from-home team, listen to any suggestions they may have, and show them some appreciation. These workers are vital to New Zealand’s primary health response. We understand that it may not always be easy working under pressure in physical isolation, so a big part of this roll out is to check in with each of them; to iron out any other issues they may have and to spend some time with them. We are bringing coffee! 

Our staff live and work in all sorts of nooks and crannies around the country. We’ll be starting slowly in Auckland for the first week, tweaking any installation factors necessary and then we’ll be going far and wide.

Accessibility
This roll out is stage one on a critical path to a whole bunch of other work to improve access to healthcare for everyone. it’s the platform if you like, to some exciting new developments over the next five years. Once these units are installed, we will be able to deploy everything from a central location to all our work-from-home workforce.

Each remote staff member will have a camera fitted to the top of their PC so they can engage with people face-to-face in the future. Virtual health care has the potential to improve equity for those living in remote areas and for Māori and Pacific people who may, for a variety of reasons, find it hard to access other health care providers. We want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to get the help they need.

If we can continue to deliver technical solutions that enable our staff more time to meet the needs of their callers, or provide technical solutions that give people a service that they weren't able to access previously, then we’re doing our job.

The future 
We responded to 1.33 million contacts in the last year, connecting with more than 700,000 individual people. That’s quite some reach. Now we want to get some depth around what we’re doing for our service users. Whether they contact us about something clinical, or they have a mental health need or if it’s an issue in the population health space, we have services to help them.

We currently operate multiple digital channels 24-hours a day, seven-days a week, all of them free to the public. SMS messaging is very popular with our mental health service 1737. Once this roll out has completed, we can consider a variety of digital platforms to reach people across our other digital channels including Healthline.

We’ll continue to work with primary health care providers to further integrate our digital offerings, so patients’ needs are met. We want to make sure the responses we offer to service users work-in seamlessly with that of their other health care professionals, always with the aim of improving patient outcomes.

Grant Taylor is CIO at Whakarongorau Aotearoa - New Zealand Telehealth Services

Hear more from Grant Taylor and other experts at our free eHealthTV Webinar ‘Does every Cloud have a silver lining?’ on June 16, 2021. Read more and register to attend here.