My View - a world-first national telehealth service

VIEW - Whakarongorau NZ Telehealth Services CIO Mike Mulvaney

Whakarongorau Aotearoa New Zealand Telehealth Services was a finalist in the 2024 CIO Awards, in the Business Transformation category for the Whakarongorau Contact Centre Platform Replacement project – replacing the existing Genesys PureConnect system with the latest Cloud-based technology NICE CXone. 

While we did not win big at the CIO awards, realising this project and its benefits has been a win for Whakarongorau and a win for our service users. It has enabled Whakarongorau to continue to lead and deliver innovation, and manage volume demand and complexity, in one of the largest contact centre environments in Aotearoa, for a world-first national telehealth service. 

Measure of success

The key measure of success for this transformation initiative is the improved ability to deliver an effortless, consistent experience throughout the service user journey. 

Whakarongorau is the social enterprise running the Government-funded free to the public, 24x7 national telehealth services across seven digital channels. In FY24 we responded to 1.8 million contacts and supported 1 in 4 people in New Zealand. 

The Contact Centre Platform Replacement project was initiated to modernise the existing Genesys PureConnect telephony platform, which had become increasingly untenable in terms of cost and operational stability during the COVID-19 scale-up and ongoing response. The platform, introduced in 2015, was key to the success of past operations, however, as the organisation grew and adapted to new demands, the platform reached its limits and a change was necessary. 

I identified the need for a cloud-native and omni-channel platform that could offer elastic scalability and align with our critical role during health events. This led the selection of a new platform that promised enhanced flexibility and integration capabilities. 

Digital transformation

Completing the Contact Centre Platform Replacement project in 2023 was a major milestone in the digital transformation journey for Whakarongorau, marking the transition from a monolithic, inflexible, and expensive legacy system to a modern, cloud-based solution that has been delivering on its promise to enhance operational efficiency and service delivery. 

The Whakarongorau Digital Innovation Strategy includes a focus on integrating AI, data-driven insights, and an omnichannel approach to offer more support to even more New Zealanders. Over the last two years, Whakarongorau has undergone significant digital transformation. 

With flexible, scalable technology, we are driving innovation with emerging technologies to make informed, proactive decisions that lead to better health outcomes. 

The Contact Centre Platform Replacement project has brought significant positive impacts to Whakarongorau, particularly in the areas of business process efficiency, stability, and scalability for health responses, and enabling innovative new services and solutions with AI and automation. 

This has included: 

1. Business Process Efficiency/Transformation:  Using AI enabled audio-to-text transcription has shown a reduction in the time required to analyse the quality of a call recording from hours to just minutes – an estimated 90% increase in efficiency, directly enhancing our business processes.  
2. New Digital Products or Services: These innovations will improve our business processes and enable new digital services, such as real-time call analysis and automated customer feedback. Several are now underway e.g. enhancing IVR systems to be smarter and more interactive with automated demographic collection before an interaction starts. This reduces wait times and gives tāngata whai ora helpful information so they can decide if they need to wait for assistance.  
   

The key challenges we face include the increasing demand for our health services; the increasing complexity of the mental health contacts we manage; and the availability of – and competition for – a clinical workforce. 

The key opportunities we see are to leverage the capabilities we have developed, particularly in the area of managing a non-clinical workforce; to deliver healthcare closer to home via telehealth; and to continuous innovation, improvement, and partnership to adapt to the changing needs of the sector and tāngata whai ora/people seeking wellness.  

Whakarongorau is at the forefront of virtual care innovation. By making key technology decisions and by listening to sector experts, we are transforming healthcare through both proven and novel approaches.  

Earlier this year, Whakarongorau engaged with over 100 clinicians, sector leaders, and innovators at the Health Informatics NZ (HiNZ) Summit. Their insights revealed a strong enthusiasm for adopting telehealth and virtual care. The challenge they delivered, alongside this enthusiasm, is that we must ensure accessing healthcare becomes as seamless as hailing a ride-share.  

Whakarongorau has been collating, distilling, and strategising those insights – they are available here. 

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

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