Star Story 4 – Safety first

Our Star Stories celebrate the many ways our teams around the country have risen to the challenges of 2020.

Within days of New Zealand’s Level 4 lockdown Southern Cross Healthcare had deployed an innovative nationwide digital contact tracing solution with the ability to determine exactly who was where, when and for how long.

Nothing is more important to Southern Cross Healthcare than New Zealanders’ health. As our hospitals continued to perform urgent surgical cases throughout lockdown levels 3 and 4, we needed to quickly and accurately trace and isolate any patient or staff member if they were to be in contact with COVID-19. This may sound simple now, but this automated solution was before the Covid tracing app was common place in New Zealand.

Through a collaborative, high speed prototyping process, the Digital Services team modelled, designed, tested and piloted an innovative data analytics tracing solution. The solution brought together diverse datasets from hospital-based systems, web services and even WiFi access logs; creating diagrammatic movement profiles of people – patients, staff and surgeons – within our hospitals.

In responding so swiftly and innovatively, Southern Cross Healthcare maintained our uncompromising commitment to patient and staff safety.