Queensland Health has deployed a Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution to help provide free hearing-screening to all infants born in Queensland.
The solution also tracks children with hearing difficulties throughout childhood, as part of its Healthy Hearing and Deadly Ears programs.
Microsoft Dynamics Australia general manager, John Leonard, said Queensland 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," he said.
"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."
In 2012, the Healthy Hearing program received funding for the development of the 0QChild 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 an XRM solution.
Queensland Health senior project officer, Gavin Bott, said the new relationship mananagment system, QChild, provided 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,” he said.
“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.”
Bott said the deployment was helping them see things they could never have seen before.
"We’re looking at quality in an entirely new way, because there simply was no possibility of us knowing the things we know now,” he said.
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.
The new Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform allows 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.
Bott said the system facilitated 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," he said.
"You can almost trace a train of thought when somebody has made an error by looking through the audit actions and time stamps.
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.
