Some years ago, Southern Cross Health Society embarked on a journey to enable each of their 850,000 members to provide feedback about their quality of life and health experiences. Not only did they intend to capture the feedback from every patient, but to share that feedback across a broad network of specialities with over 1,000 providers, in a way that drives improved outcomes for patients. Inspired by their ambition, Cemplicity set about making this vision a reality.
It wasn’t easy – Southern Cross provided us with a number of member and user stories, which outlined how they wanted each key stakeholder to engage with the programme. For example:
“Each member will have the opportunity to complete a self-assessment of their quality of life before they go into hospital.”
Daily Integration
Immediately, this meant we needed at a minimum, a daily integration with Southern Cross’s core system to capture every member before they went for treatment. No point asking how they felt before a treatment, if they have already had the treatment!
Even more consideration was given to how the health providers themselves were going to use the data in a secure, informative way – consider this user story:
“A provider wants to be able to login and very quickly see how their patient’s experiences and outcomes compare to the national or regional average within their speciality. They should be able to analyse the data by demographics, procedure subspecialty, region, date period, and contract specifics.”
Security Infrastructure
Cemplicity knew that the security infrastructure we had established in work with the Health Quality and Safety Commission’s National Patient Experience Survey (NPES) would be critical here. Every provider would need to have access to specific, but anonymous, feedback from their patients, yet also access an aggregated view of their colleagues results for benchmarking purposes. To enable this, we built a dynamic data hierarchy meaning we could accurately reflect the mapping of regions, facilities and providers which can change frequently.
System wide benefits
The team at Cemplicity are really proud of the work we did to help Southern Cross achieve this vision but neither of us is standing still. We want to our data to be even more networked, we want the insight to be deeper – delving into the specific needs of each speciality. Ultimately, we want our collaboration to drive better care for Southern Cross’s members, and as a single instance SaaS company – all Cemplicity clients will see the benefits.
We are really looking forward to sharing our learnings at the HINZ Conference this November in Wellington. We are sponsoring the conference as well, so please stop by and see myself or one of the team if you can.