NZ eases access to mental health, addiction support

New Zealand's Ministry of Health has officially launched an online portal for accessing the services provided by the Access and Choice programme. 

The said website puts all Access and Choice primary mental health and addiction services in one place, according to Minister of Health Dr Ayesha Verrall. 

Through the website, people dealing with mild and moderate mental health and addiction issues can find a local provider and connect with services that offer free support. 

New pregnancy monitoring tech gets pre-seed backing from UniMelb

The University of Melbourne is providing a A$500,000 ($330,000) pre-seed investment to Kali Healthcare, a startup that is developing a new foetal heart rate monitoring technology.

Based on a media release, the pregnancy monitoring system consists of a small wearable device and sensor patch that accurately picks up a baby's heart rate. 

This technology, according to co-founder and UniMelb Associate Professor Fiona Brownfoot, "will allow women to be active in labour without the foetal heart rate dropping out." It can also possibly be applied for at-home monitoring during telehealth consults, reducing the need for high-risk pregnant women to travel to a hospital for ultrasound monitoring. 

With UniMelb's investment, Kali Healthcare can move to a clinical trial phase by next year, the media release noted.

Whakarongorau Aotearoa shifts to cloud-based contact centre ops

Whakarongorau Aotearoa – New Zealand Telehealth Services has engaged Israeli company NICE and its partner Converged Communication Network Applications to upgrade its contact centre operations and provide a seamless customer experience.

The social enterprise owned by ProCare and Pegasus Health manages New Zealand's free, 24/7 telehealth services across seven digital channels, including Healthline, 1737 Need to talk?, Peer Support, Quitline, Ambulance secondary triage, the Gambling Helpline, the Alcohol Drug Helpline, and Poisons Advice.

According to a media release, it will be implementing NICE's cloud-based CXone platform, fulfilling its need for a "more agile and flexible solution" to handle all its operations, which have significantly grown throughout the pandemic. 

CXone provides comprehensive reporting capabilities that will allow the organisation to "achieve greater insight into its services at a granular level," thereby giving it the ability to further streamline its operations. 

"NICE CXone enables us to rapidly respond to changing public health events, seamlessly scale the supporting workforce as needed without disruption to service users and will empower us to provide better service to reach even more New Zealanders," said Mike Mulvaney, director of Technology Services at Whakarongorau Aotearoa.

Primary Health Tasmania automates health service procurement on Appian

Primary Health Tasmania, one of Tasmania's primary health networks, has turned to automation and business process management to transform the way it conducts health service procurement.

Previously, Primary Health Tasmania had to use word documents and e-mails to procure health services, which was cumbersome, time-consuming and prone to work duplication. 

It has tapped Appian and its partner Roboyo to provide its teams with organisation-wide digital dashboard analysis and reporting across project proposal and procurement processes via the Appian platform so they can track and meet targets and timelines.