Avocado and Splunk: revolutionising Realtime Healthcare performance tracking
Case Study - Virtual Clinical Call Centre
About Our Client
Virtual Clinical Call Centre
NSW Ambulance is one of Australia’s largest healthcare providers, offering mobile health services and clinical, rescue, and paramedic care.
With a stated focus on innovation to continue to provide superior services, NSW Ambulance has collaborated with Avocado since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, enhancing their Splunk journey and paving the way for technological advancements.
The Challenge
NSW Ambulance needed to respond to rising demand – more than 115,000 calls per month – which was unprecedented and well above pre-COVID-19 levels. With spikes in calls due to the flu season and staff sick, NSW Ambulance needed a way to handle less-urgent cases in real-time while improving operational management.
To do this, they wanted to set up a Virtual Call Centre (VCCC), which monitored calls and acted like a secondary triage centre when dealing with low acuity cases. They needed to provide the same level of monitoring as their other services, with the ability to track their patients through their alternative care journey. This ensured patients were receiving the care they needed, such as callbacks from clinicians while easing the pressure on paramedics and call centre staff.
NSW Ambulance turned to Avocado as its collaborator to innovate how transactions and service delivery were tracked.
At the time, one of the key challenges for patient tracking was the lack of visibility into call volume and reprioritisation happening within a given day.
This lack of insight hindered efficient management and made it challenging to respond proactively to potential risks. This factor is particularly critical during peak demand periods – and doubly so during COVID.
The VCCC tracks each call as a transaction tied with relevant metrics. However, data structure issues and a lack of unique, persistent identifiers at the time led to problems correlating and proving causality across systems. As a result, there was a need to re-engineer data and systems to provide transparent insights into real-time performance metrics covering key areas like call response time and time to dispatch.
These insights are necessary for NSW Ambulance’s ability to evaluate its effectiveness and identify areas of improvement. NSW Ambulance’s strategic goals include innovating and improving patient flow and outcomes. Reaching this objective requires a clear understanding of current operations and identifying potential areas for innovation and enhancement.
”“The Virtual Clinical Call Centre (VCCC) has eased the massive demand faced by NSW Ambulance post-covid. By setting up a secondary triage centre, we ensure patients are receiving the right clinical level of care and in the right timeframe.”
The Approach:
To ensure a smooth transition, Avocado was responsible for developing the test cases and repository, along with creating application scenarios for both the back end and editorial teams. Additionally, Avocado supported the Quality Assurance activities, which involved defect resolution, system enhancements for business as usual (BAU), quarterly releases, and content updates.
Throughout the project, Avocado performed role-based testing during more than 12 releases, ensuring end-to-end process validation. They also conducted targeted and risk-based testing to verify that the functionality aligned with expected outcomes and acceptance criteria. For each sprint, Avocado executed pre-regression and post-regression testing after code deployment.
Notably, Avocado’s testing efforts aimed to ensure not only the proper functioning of newly added syllabuses but also the existing ones. This involved exploratory and negative testing to thoroughly evaluate the system’s performance.
The project was a collaborative effort involving various stakeholders within the team. Avocado interacted with all stakeholders, including Business Analysts, development partners, and the client’s editorial team, working in an Agile-type environment. They also provided updates to the Minister.
Avocado uplifted inhouse capabilities to ensure testing IP remained with the client. Initially, Avocado recorded and reported findings using Microsoft Office Suite for test case execution but later introduced Jira to provide concrete evidence of their testing efforts. They established testing practices inhouse to ensure a smooth flow of the project and conducted daily stand-ups and defect meetings with vendors. Retrospective meetings were held to continuously improve future activities.
The Outcome
The collaboration between Avocado and NSW Ambulance increased reporting capabilities built within Splunk and provided a strong data foundation informing crucial decisions. The streamlined call centre operations allow for a comprehensive end-to-end journey correlation, significantly enhancing operational management.
This optimisation proved invaluable during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis, when hospitals were operating at maximum capacity, and swift decision-making (and patient allocation) was a matter of life and death.
NSW Ambulance, equipped with enhanced dashboarding and operational management, continuously refines their data inputs to make informed decisions and continue to innovate. The organisation has upgraded from Avocado’s green model to the Gold Managed Services Model, a comprehensive platform management offering. Under the gold model, our certified professionals work hand in hand with you, guaranteeing seamless end-to-end environment management. Whether on-site or remote, Avocado dedicates itself to meeting your business and operational needs, and the optional 24×7 on-call service ensures round-the-clock support.
One example of the gold model’s benefits was a successful cloud migration enabled through the managed service. Avocado assisted NSW Ambulance in aligning with regional health mandates and a move to Splunk Cloud, overcoming challenges, designing use cases to facilitate the migration, and optimising the use of Splunk Cloud.
