viewhealth chemo@home
Streamlining Mobile Medical Staff Coordination For At-Home Treatments
First published by Microsoft 02 July 2020.
viewhealth chemo@home offers a range of at-home treatments for cancer patients across Australia, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and infusions, as well as medications for patients with other chronic diseases. Administered by a team of trained nurses, chemo@home is a leading country provider of alternative means of treatment, and it serves more than 7,400 home-based patients. Its work helps free up hospital wards and delivers savings to the Australian government.
viewhealth chemo@home approached illuminance solutions to guide its digital transformation journey by designing, developing, and deploying a full ICT strategy to create a reliable, all-in-one, technology-driven solution to address its issues; AvantCare.
Home-based healthcare providers face many challenges, including sustainability and transparency, that directly affect the quality of the services they can deliver. AvantCare meets these challenges by ensuring operational efficiencies, allowing medical workers to focus on caregiving instead of administrative work and manual reporting.
chemo@home provides in-home services with the help of a widely distributed workforce that communicates primarily through mobile devices (phones, tablets, and laptops). Essential to the at-home treatment process is the ability to match medical workers’ qualification to patients’ needs and to ensure that correct equipment is available for service delivery.
Successfully managing a large mobile team and providing staff members with immediate access to critical patient information is crucial to the company’s success and to maintaining proper treatment for the thousands of patients who rely on their services. But the devices that chemo@home relied on sometimes experienced connectivity issues, and they leveraged different technologies. Together, these challenges risked major increases in support costs.
chemo@home approached illuminance solutions to guide its digital transformation journey by designing, developing, and deploying a full ICT strategy to create a reliable, all-in-one, technology-driven solution to address its issues.
“In these COVID-19 times, chemo@home has been able to really come to the forefront, thanks in part to AvantCare and the Microsoft Cloud Platform to effectively manage our widely disbursed workforce using what we already have.”
The AvantCare Solution
The AvantCare solution transformed chemo@home’s digital processes to enable increased visibility of field staff and equipment. It also improved day-to-day scheduling functions and operational efficiency, so more time and energy can now be focused on delivering high-quality care to patients.
AvantCare by illuminance solutions is a Microsoft Dynamics 365-based platform that links data on activities performed by a care provider’s various functional groups. It also provides operational access to on-the-go medical teams across devices. Further, the embedded Microsoft Teams application gives workers a team-first view of company resources on all device types. And AvantCare is backed by Microsoft Azure and Enterprise Mobility + Security to manage and protect user identity, devices, and installed applications remotely.
All the Microsoft services are configured to suit chemo@home and are positioned for further cloud growth and transformation via Microsoft technologies. The solution continues to expand through Power Apps and Power Automate, allowing AvantCare to adapt to environmental changes rapidly. In addition, Power BI provides a clear overview of operational and service delivery trends.
By adopting AvantCare, viewhealth chemo@home is provided with an agile platform responsive to its needs:
All chemo@home team members can now connect to a single system through any device, whether it runs on Android or iOS.
Staff reporting has significantly improved.
Critical patient information is now easily accessible to chemo@home workers.
chemo@home was able to redirect the time saved on administrative tasks, such as matching staff qualifications to customers’ needs, to improving patient care.
Home-based healthcare providers face many challenges, including sustainability and transparency, that directly affect the quality of the services they can deliver. AvantCare meets these challenges by ensuring operational efficiencies, allowing medical workers to focus on caregiving instead of administrative work and manual reporting.
“The flexibility of Microsoft Business Applications and constant attention to keeping them modern and applicable to technological changes has allowed us to grow the business and focus on patient care and the infrastructure takes care of itself.”
Adoption in the face of COVID-19
The timing of the AvantCare rollout proved to be fortuitous. Its substantial investment in Microsoft cloud-based applications in 2019 enabled illuminance solutions to further assist chemo@home as it rapidly onboarded resources to address an unprecedented rise in demand for its services in direct response to the coronavirus pandemic. As the Australian government encouraged isolation and promoted at-home care for people who are immunocompromised or otherwise at high risk of infection, chemo@home proved to have a tailor-made solution with AvantCare.
By bringing together the right technology and the right people, the timely adoption of AvantCare has allowed chemo@home to respond successfully to an unprecedented health crisis, with no loss of services to those who matter most – its patients.
“It has been inspiring to watch chemo@home go from strength to strength, thinking outside the box and providing a public service that is convenient, and then almost transformed to arguably being essential during COVID-19.”