Tiaki
MMPO are the primary member organisation for community midwives in New Zealand. While conducting user workshops for a brand and website project, we discovered that creating and sending referrals was a significant pain point for midwives. The needed to carry paper forms and scan or fax them which was error prone and time consuming.
Armed with our knowledge of MMPO, we saw an opportunity for them to provide a highly valuable tool that brought to life their kaupapa to support midwives to provide quality care. MMPO jumped at the chance and commissioned us to build a custom digital referral tool.
Referrals
We started small with simple wireframes and focus groups to ensure we fully understood the problem and could find the best way to solve it. The journey to a great solution led us to develop a custom tool for scanning, importing and filling the huge variety of custom forms found for health services around the country. With a huge amount of help from MMPO, we turned this into a comprehensive digital library of maternity related referrals from around the country.
Integrated government health systems
The tool integrates with government and district health systems to rapidly and securely generate referrals from any device with fields pre-filled from available data. What used to be carrying and searching through a huge stack of paper forms followed by copying over details by hand, is now completed in just a few taps.
An ever growing set of tools
The success of the referral tool led on to further developments, the largest of which is a calendar and scheduling solution that allows teams of midwives to collaboratively manage their caseload. The system includes the option for video appointments along with text and email reminders for the women to decrease missed appointments.
Results
In the 18 months since launch midwives have sent over 60,000 referrals with the tool and MMPO conservatively estimate it has saved over 5000 hours of midwife time. Midwives have also managed more than 20,000 appointments.
Ultimately the tool came about through our knowledge of the organisation, a deep understanding of user needs, and the smart implementation of technology.
