Asthma NZ embarks on digital transformation plan

eHealthNews.nz: Clinical Software

Thursday, 18 August 2022

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Asthma New Zealand will leverage data and technology as it seeks to reduce asthma and COPD hospitalisations by 50 percent by 2029.

Asthma New Zealand chief executive Katheren Leitner says she’s keen to harness technology to extend the organisation’s reach and accelerate its path to achieving reductions in hospitalisations.

She says patient education is the key to effective asthma management. Patients who complete Asthma NZ’s 3-Plus Self-Management Programme are 87 percent less likely to be re-admitted to the ER room for respiratory related problems and are 61 percent less reliant on reliever mediation.

“I realised quickly after joining Asthma New Zealand that we can never employ enough nurses to extend our reach enough,” Leitner says.

“Humans, as important as they are, aren’t enough. We have to develop our triage systems, and that involves using technology.”

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The organisation has partnered with Quanton to develop a digitisation plan leveraging an integrated approach to data, technology, people and processes, to achieve its goal of slashing hospitalisations.

The first step has been deploying a new customer relationship management system to enable nurses to collect information more effectively when with patients and increase their productivity.

In the past nurses recorded information manually while with patients in their homes or out in the community, returning to the office to enter it into an old Access database, which acted as a data repository with little facility for extracting and using that data to show trends and make decisions.

Using Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM nurses can now enter data directly into smart devices – and the CRM – while talking to patients in the community.

“Ultimately we want to enable patients at times to be able to enter their data themselves, so they can be involved in their health records,” Leitner says.

“A lot of higher risk or higher needs community have an innate distrust of the health system, and enabling them to be involved with the data helps in terms of the relationship and trust because they can see exactly what is entered about them.”

Leitner notes the system has already resulted in an improvement in the completeness and quality of the data collected.

The future technologies Asthma New Zealand are keen to harness will rely heavily on access to data to facilitate more productive ways of working making the deployment of the CRM a crucial first technology step.

“It gives them good foundation to be able to scale up now and in the future,” says John Che, customer success manager at Quanton.

“If we want to utilise artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversational AI or a patient or doctor portal, they have a very good foundation for all of those future integrations.”

Leitner says Asthma New Zealand is working with Quanton to increase its use and effectiveness of the new CRM, while also in tandem looking at the next steps in overlaying emerging technologies such as gamification tools, conversational AI bots, machine learning and leveraging exponential thinking to amplify their impact and effectiveness.

“The CRM is driving productivity, but it’s also ensuring we’re getting data so we can move further along our digital roadmap,” she says.