Posted on behalf of John Leonard, General Manager, Microsoft Dynamics Australia
One of the most rewarding aspects of my job is seeing the impact of technology on the end-user – and when the benefactor is a healthcare department, that sense of achievement is always more special.
Recently, we’ve been working with Queensland Health on its ‘Healthy Hearing’ program, which aims to provide free hearing screening to all infants born in Queensland and track children with hearing difficulties throughout childhood.
To effectively deliver this program, Queensland Health needed a system capable of collecting all hearing screening data from newborns, which could centralise all collected data, eliminate record duplication, identify and quarantine possible data errors, provide analysis, and automatically direct children needing treatment to the appropriate medical resource and track their progress. Additionally, the program needed the capacity to report data on indicators identified in the National Performance Indicators to Support Neonatal Hearing Screening in Australia.
As I’m sure you can appreciate, this was no simple task, and more than a match for the system’s existing platforms, draining important staff resources.
A Tailored Solution
In 2012, the Healthy Hearing program received funding for the development of the “QChild” system, which aimed to cover management of child birth data, hearing screen results, audiology consultations and extended care pathways data.
Since Queensland Health already used Microsoft Dynamics CRM and other related Microsoft technologies, the organisation decided to expand on its deployment of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to meet its requirements.
Working with Microsoft Consulting Services, which established the baseline requirements, and Microsoft Silver CRM Partner Simient, Queensland Health was able to rapidly deploy a highly-tailored XRM solution. So named in that it can manage relationships with anything, not just customers, through configuration instead of costly custom code changes, allowing Queensland Health’s solution to meet their complex requirements.
Speaking about the deployment, Gavin Bott, Queensland Health Senior Project Officer said: “Our new relationship management system, QChild, provides us with secure access to data for all users in every hospital that births babies in the Queensland Health system. There is also integration with organisations that see children along the Healthy Hearing continuum, such as Audiology and Family Support Services, the multidisciplinary Childhood Hearing Clinics and Early Intervention.”
“A secondary web-based system, The QChild Portal, enables data from all birthing hospitals across Queensland to be processed and imported into QChild, triggering automated workflows based on the screening results.”
Unprecedented Insight
The program has been a massive success at Queensland Health, with it now able to attain unprecedented levels of business intelligence.
“We are seeing things that we could never have seen before, and we’re looking at quality in an entirely new way, because there simply was no possibility of us knowing the things we know now,” Gavin told me.
For instance, QChild enables the Healthy Hearing program to facilitate institutional knowledge across the organisation to better understand why and how certain actions were taken. Similarly, staff can better review patient timelines, such as time from birth to referral to appointment, and can set up dashboards alerting them to whenever someone slips outside of benchmarks.
Queensland Health’s new Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform empowers it to better review internal performance to ensure a consistently high quality of work. Additionally, the system is capable of reporting hearing screening data at a national level, while ensuring each infant receives the care they need at a local level.
“The system facilitates institutional knowledge across the organisation: The full record of audit where every action is recorded allows us to understand not only what’s been done, but very often you can see why things have been done. You can almost trace a train of thought when somebody has made an error by looking through the audit actions and time stamps,” Gavin added.
Following the success of the project’s first phase, it was great to recently hear Queensland Health has extended its use of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to its Deadly Ears program – a state-wide ear health program specifically for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, which aims to create long term changes across the education, health and early years’ services sectors.
The results Queensland Health have achieved with our technology have been incredibly rewarding, and I’m looking forward to seeing the department’s continued success in the future.
