P R O J E C T R E P O R T
WHAKARONGORAU AOTEAROA SUPPORT RAL LY I NG THE D I G I TAL ARMY TO BAT T L E COV I D - 1 9
The traditional wartime expression, now meme, ‘Keep Calm and Carry On” has new relevance in our response to the Covid-19 pandemic—a moment in time that put everyone to the test, resulting in achievements that ordinarily would not be attempted. In early 2020, Homecare Medical (recently re-named Whakarongorau Aotearoa)—the organisation responsible for the National Telehealth Service—was faced with having to rapidly transform the way they worked while still trying to keep kiwis connected to health information throughout the country. Just as in a war, when challenges arise an inventory of people from all areas is required to ensure that the best experts for the task are engaged. When Whakarongorau Aotearoa had to increase their team and support them to work remotely, they called in Spark, Spark Health and CCL — forming a special ops team to implement a five-month IT programme in a few weeks.
desktop infrastructure service, delivered from Microsoft Azure, for remotely accessing client desktops and applications. But this wasn’t going to be easy, especially at pace whilst maintaining and scaling the existing critical digital services that had been in place for five years. Additional challenges were thrown at them caused by the growing global and national supply chain issues compounding the availability of hardware— laptops and headsets for staff. “Every staff member needed to have all the right tools, a desk, a computer and they had to be inducted. We also had to build robust security and privacy frameworks, especially to allow staff to be able to work from home…to make sure nothing was compromised,” says Andrew Slater CEO of Homecare Medical
and doctors and contact centre staff from House of Travel and Plunket. All of these team members needed to be able to access their existing contact centre solution, customer relationship management system and clinical pathways tools securely and remotely, from all around New Zealand. To meet this urgent need the multi-skilled team led out by Spark Health formed a plan to connect Whakarongorau Aotearoa to the public cloud using Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) — a virtual
the operation — stronger together
When Whakarongorau Aotearoa won the national telehealth services contract in 2015, Spark Group was chosen as their Digital Services Strategic Partner. Spark Group provides a wide range of Telco, Cloud and IT Services to help Whakarongorau Aotearoa provide services across seven different digital channels to all New Zealanders including Healthline and 1737. Covid-19 provided a new and unique challenge for the strategic
the challenge
The digital services at Whakarongorau Aotearoa had to expand beyond six times their usual size and needed to enable most of its existing staff to work from home. In addition to this, they needed to onboard more call centre staff which they recruited from retired nurses
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