How Queensland Health used digital communications to manage COVID-19
Overview
Queensland Health delivers a range of integrated services including hospital inpatient, outpatient and emergency services, community and mental health services, aged care services and public health and health promotion programs to more than five million Queensland residents. Through a network of 16 Hospital and Health Services, they are committed to ensuring all Queenslanders have access to a range of public healthcare services.
The Challenge
During the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, Queensland Health and state agencies rapidly organized to address the crisis. Contact tracers identified positive cases and transmission routes. Initially, patients were individually contacted to assess symptoms, movements, and contacts. With cases potentially surging into thousands daily, a tech solution became crucial.
The Solutions
Survey positive cases
Utilising Whispir surveys, Queensland Health achieved a consistent 72 percent response rate. Through SMS technology, COVID-positive individuals received a survey link, gathering clinical details, risk factors, and high-risk location visits. This data identified high-risk cases needing clinical follow-up and enabled resource allocation and outbreak source identification.
Integration and automation
Using Whispir's integration, pathology results triggered surveys automatically, minimising notification delays for positive cases. Recipients typically responded within four hours, with reminders for non-responders sent to ensure timely completion.
The Results
Quick to implement and use
The nature of the pandemic meant Queensland Health had limited time to recruit a specialised team to deal with the increasing case numbers. Whispir’s low-code, nocode functionality enabled a speedy initial setup with a scalable solution that enabled Queensland Health to be highly responsive in a fast-changing environment.
Timely communications
Whispir’s integration and automation features enabled timely communication upon receipt of positive results, providing valuable insights and data surrounding COVID-19 cases and ensure response and resources could be directed appropriately.
Reduction in resources and manual intervention
Whispir’s built-in integration and automation features proved critical, ensuring Queensland Health resources were able to focus on specific cases, allocating clinicians to the right person’s care, and alleviating work pressures on an already busy team.
Security and privacy
Whispir meets all of the Australian government’s privacy and security requirements, ensuring that sensitive personal data remains secure throughout the entire workflow and all data is kept within Australia, meets data retention policies.
Ruth Farrell, Business Analytics and Reporting Manager
“When Omicron came onto the scene things quickly pivoted. The thing that I found most impressive about Whispir was that we could flip so quickly into something that we’d planned on a very small scale to something where we were sending out between seven and 8,000 texts a day to new cases. “