Pacific health provider cuts nurse travel time in half with AI-powered RPM tool

NEWS  - eHealthNews editor Rebecca McBeth

A Wellington-based Pacific health provider has halved nurse travel time after deploying an AI-powered remote monitoring tool that allows patients to submit their vitals, food logs and health updates from home through WhatsApp.

Pacific Health Services Hutt Valley serves more than 17,000 Pacific people in the Hutt Valley region and decided to pilot Speedback in December 2024 following a study tour to Singapore. 

Candice Apelu Mariner, general manager of Pacific Health Services Hutt Valley, presented at the Te Tītoki Mataora Forum on July 2 where she told attendees that within three months of launching the pilot, it had cut both nurse travel time and administrative workload by 50 percent.

This allowed the organisation to scale its use of RPM to 321 clients without increasing staff levels.

The platform, developed by Singapore-based Equitech, uses WhatsApp and SMS rather than a dedicated app.

Apelu Mariner said WhatsApp is already used by Pacific communities to stay connected with whānau in the islands, making the platform a natural fit rather than a new behaviour to learn.

Patients submit blood pressure readings, wound images, blood sugar levels, and photos of their food through the messaging platform, which are interpreted by AI.

Patients can access AI chat for general queries, education, and condition specific guidance and clinicians monitor trends and send personalised nudges to patients in the community.

"Before Speedback, we were looking at time-consuming phone calls and home visits: we would have referrals from GPs for our nurses just to go and take a blood pressure for families at home because they didn't have transport," she said.

Before using Speedback, a single clinician could actively monitor around eight clients through in-person visits, she explained.

"You look at 321 clients that we can monitor every day versus only eight that could come into a clinic to see one person. That is our return on investment in a tool that enables us to scale and see more people rather than just have one FTE seeing low numbers of people,” said Apelu Mariner, 

She said the AI-powered tool is multilingual so messages can be sent in Samoan and other Pacific languages, as well as Te Reo Māori. 

Megan Barnes, New Zealand business development manager for Equitech, told the conference that continuous technology-enabled monitoring shifts healthcare from “episodic events or reactive visits to persistent presence or proactive actions.

"It is not merely a digital substitute for a physical visit, it is a mechanism to extract meaningful care moments from the background noise of daily life,” she said.

Image: Candice Apelu Mariner and Megan Barnes presenting at the Te Tītoki Mataora Forum on July 2

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