Healthcare organization digitized and scaled amidst pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic quickly revealed that greater dexterity is necessary for all types of businesses. Unprecedented demand for speed, safety, and access to timley information became mandatory, especially in high-risk environments such as hospitals and clinics. With pandemic anxiety still high and cases rising in neighboring states, UnitingCare was obligated to demonstrate to Queensland Health that it could respond quickly and efficiently to a potential second wave of coronavirus cases.

Contact tracing – the process used to understand how an infectious disease is spreading in a community by identifying who a sick person caught an illness from, and to find out who they’ve been in contact with while infectious – is a critical component to minimizing the spread of the virus. Serving healthcare teams in locations across Queensland, the charity needed a better COVID contact tracing system.

Responsible for meeting government mandates for COVID-19 contact tracing, UnitingCare found it necessary to improve its ability to respond quickly and efficiently in the event of a second wave in Queensland. To do so, UnitingCare needed to digitize its manual, paper-based tracing procedures to ensure processing of more than 2,000 check-ins per hour across its health facilities, and quickly produce accurate reporting to Queensland Health.

Sitecore and partner Triggerfish delivered a self-managed PaaS cloud deployment of Sitecore on Microsoft Azure. UnitingCare’s COVID Management Team was responsible for replacing the manual, hand-written processes with the tracing application at each location.

Triggerfish performed a number of onsite visits to observe the user experience and implemented changes to grow usability of the platform across the population. This included the integration of Twilio for return visit authentication and support for a variety of devices, including support for customers without devices.

Having access to data on their own platforms means identifying potentially infectious contacts can occur within 30 minutes of a request from Queensland Health for tracing notification request. And, to satisfy privacy and security requirements, all data is stored in Australia and is encrypted both while in transit and at rest.

Sitecore’s solution sets UnitingCare apart by empowering the organization to act swiftly and at scale, precisely when needed. By building the application on UnitingCare’s existing infrastructure, the charity is currently screening people across 150 locations — with the ability to scale further to 500 when required without affecting the customer experience.

The solution has enabled more than 35,000 check-ins, over 25,000 unique individuals traced, and data request notifications are completed in under 30 minutes.