Asthma NZ Leverages Tech And Exponential Thinking To Slash Asthma Hospitalisations And Focus On The Future

Asthma New Zealand leverages tech and Exponential
thinking to slash asthma hospitalisations and focus on the
future way of working

Ambitious goal to
cut hospitalisations by 50% by 2029 receives boost with
Quanton partnership

Summary

• Asthma
  New Zealand has embarked on a transformational
  digitalisation journey as it seeks to slash asthma and COPD
  hospitalisations by 50% by 2029.
• Low levels of
  health literacy in New Zealand are a significant reason for
  why hospitalisation rates for chronic conditions such as
  asthma are so high. New Zealand which has the second highest
  asthma rate in the world.
• Patient education is the
  key to effective asthma management, technology provides a
  powerful platform to do this.
• Partnering with
  Quanton, Asthma New Zealand has implemented new operating
  model and rolled out a new CRM as the foundation for more
  advanced technologies.

Auckland,
Thursday August 18th 2022, – Asthma New Zealand’s
transformation digitisation plans – and its aims to cut
asthma and COPD hospitalisation in New Zealand by 50 percent
by 2029 – have been given a kickstart with the deployment
of the first stage of its digital transformation
plan.

The not-for-profit provides asthma education
nationwide through its nursing team which delivers
in-community education, training and support to enable New
Zealanders to self-manage their respiratory
conditions.

It has teamed up with New Zealand digital
transformation and automation specialists Quanton –
including the company’s Operational Excellence Practice
– to develop a digitisation plan leveraging an integrated
approach to data, technology, people and processes, to
achieve its goal of slashing hospitalisations by 50
percent.

Respiratory illness is the third-leading
cause of death in New Zealand which has the second highest
asthma rate in the world. Low levels of health literacy in
the country are a significant reason for why hospitalisation
rates for chronic conditions such as asthma are so
high.

Asthma New Zealand CEO Katheren Leitner says
she’s keen to harness technology to extend the
organisation’s reach, enabling it to accelerate its path
to achieving reductions in hospitalisations.

Patient
education is the key to effective asthma management,
technology provides a powerful platform to do this. Patients
who complete Asthma NZ’s 3-Plus Self-Management Programme
are 87 percent less likely to be re-admitted to the ER room
for respiratory related problems and are 61 percent less
reliant on reliever mediation.

“I realised quickly
after joining Asthma New Zealand that we can never employ
enough nurses to extend our reach enough,” Leitner says.
“Humans, as important as they are, aren’t enough. We
have to develop our triage systems, and that involves using
technology.”

Beyond technology

While Asthma
New Zealand is eyeing up a future harnessing advanced
technologies including , conversational artificial
intelligence, gamification and more integrated systems, the
first step for the organisation has been deploying a new
customer relationship management system to enable nurses to
collect information more effectively when with patients and
increase their productivity.

In the past nurses
recorded information manually while with patients in their
homes or out in the community, returning to the office to
enter it into an old Access database, which acted as a data
repository with little facility for extracting and using
that data to show trends and make decisions.

Using
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM nurses can now enter data
directly into smart devices – and the CRM – while
talking to patients in the community.

“Ultimately we
want to enable patients at times to be able to enter their
data themselves, so they can be involved in their health
records,” Leitner says. “A lot of higher risk or higher
needs community have an innate distrust of the health
system, and enabling them to be involved with the data helps
in terms of the relationship and trust because they can see
exactly what is entered about them.”

Leitner notes
the system has already resulted in an improvement in the
completeness and quality of the data collected.

The
Exponential path to extending Asthma NZ’s
reach

While the CRM is the first technology deployed
under the new partnership with Quanton, Asthma New Zealand
has also been working with Quanton’s Operational
Excellence Practice to develop a ‘plan on a
page’.

Asthma New Zealand worked with Quanton on
Exponential thinking, to approach the problem differently
rather than traditional linear approaches. A plan was formed
that would enable Asthma New Zealand to make the quantum
leap it desired, become an ‘exponential organisation’
and have a greatly amplified positive health
impact.

Ravi Kulatunga, Quanton Operational Excellence
Practice Lead says “Before you can travel down a
digitisation path, it’s really important to get your
business models and your people right. One of the key things
for digitisation is the availability and access to data to
make informed decisions around what technologies you are
going to use. That is what has come out of working with
Asthma New Zealand so they can start to look further
ahead.”

The future technologies Asthma New Zealand
are keen to harness will rely heavily on access to data to
facilitate more productive ways of working making the
deployment of the CRM a crucial first technology
step.

“It gives them good foundation to be able to
scale up now and in the future,” says John Che, Customer
Success Manager at Quanton. “If we want to utilise
artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversational AI
or a patient or doctor portal, they have a very good
foundation for all of those future
integrations.”

Leitner says Asthma New Zealand is
currently working with Quanton to increase its use and
effectiveness of the new CRM, while also in tandem looking
at the next steps in overlaying emerging technologies such
as gamification tools, conversational AI bots, machine
learning and leveraging exponential thinking to amplify
their impact and effectiveness.

“The CRM is driving
productivity, but it’s also ensuring we’re getting data
so we can move further along our digital roadmap,” she
says.

About Quanton

Quanton transforms
business operating models to a new, future-focused way of
working by helping build capability and find the sweet spots
where operational excellence or automation can have the
biggest impact on a business – with quantifiable
benefit.

Quanton is led by its advisory services, and
a specialised range of emerging automation and AI
technologies, helping organisations simplify automation.
Aligning digital transformation with their vision and
strategy and connecting activity to the realisation of
business goals. www.quanton.co.nz

About
Asthma New Zealand

Asthma New Zealand is a
not-for-profit organisation committed to creating a
healthier New Zealand, where every Kiwi with Asthma and COPD
(Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) lives a full
life.

As New Zealand’s largest asthma educator, we
have been at the forefront, fighting for a New Zealand that
breathes easy since 1965. Education is the most powerful
tool in reducing hospitalisation and improving the way we
live with asthma and COPD. Our Nurses go to where our
patients needs us to be, our services are free and can be
accessed by everyone.

Our mission is to see a 50%
reduction in asthma and COPD hospitalisation by
2029.

Nothing else matters when you can’t
breathe.

www.asthma.org.nz

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