Healthdirect Australia and MediRecords, an Australian-owned health tech start-up, joined together to deliver the National Coronavirus Helpline. MediRecords is a member of Leidos Australia’s bid for JP 2060 Phase 4.
The helpline was directed to rapidly scale-up in March 2020 to become a go-to source of truth for the public. The scale-up required Healthdirect Australia to quickly add hundreds more staff to the helpline, calling on call centre providers from around the country to meet demand. To achieve this, Healthdirect Australia needed a service provider agnostic call centre management platform.
“Under normal circumstances building a new telehealth service would take a few months, but we really only had a few days,” Healthdirect Australia’s Chief Technology Officer, Grant Sayer, said. “The new service needed to be standardised so that a panel of call centre providers could use it, have shared access to encounter records and we could leverage consistent data, and it needed to be centralised so we could manage it effectively.”
Healthdirect Australia was able to move very quickly, standing up a robust and scalable telehealth service which managed clinical and general calls in record time. MediRecords technology and Amazon Web Services enabled the build of the bespoke call centre management solution.
MediRecords provided the clinical administration system which was set-up quickly to fit the specifications of the helpline. MediRecords acts as the database for information collected by call handlers on each call.
“The electronic health record system provided by MediRecords enables our call handlers to record up-to-date, relevant clinical encounter information from each caller. From the start, this de-identified data has been a source of valuable information to provide to the government as they continue to deal with COVID-19,” Sayer said.
JP2060 Phase 4 seeks to acquire and sustain a commercial, information technology (IT), enterprise knowledge solution that captures health data, and collates and manages the information across the ADF health care continuum within the deployed and non-deployed, garrison environment.
The solution will be required to provide greater healthcare business functionality, utilise an efficient health informatics process and enable efficient and safe, evidenced based, patient-centric care.