I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll keep saying it: Technology is just one part of the equation when it comes to transformation and operational excellence. Before you can travel down a digitisation path, it’s really important to get your business models and data right, as well as equipping and empowering your people.
One of the key things around digitisation is the availability and access to quality data at the right time as well as actionable insights so you can make informed decisions.
A good example of this is one of our valued clients, Asthma New Zealand.
Katheren Leitner, Asthma New Zealand’s CEO, has massive transformation purpose and ambition – not just for digital transformation but as an ‘exponential organisation’ – and we’re thrilled to be working on the digital strategy to support her.
Katheren has a goal by 2029 to halve the number of hospitalisations for asthma and COPD in New Zealand, where respiratory illness is the third leading causes of death. It’s a big goal and one Katheren knows requires technology support in order to accomplish it.
Asthma NZ provides community education, training and support to enable New Zealanders to self-manage their respiratory conditions, via a team of nurses.
But in order to extend the reach of her team – and help drive down those hospitalisations –Katheren needs more than just additional nurses. As she says, she can never employ enough nurses to extend the organisation’s reach enough and provide 700,000 Kiwis with full autonomy over their respiratory health.
It’s an issue that organisations both locally and globally are grappling with.
How can we increase productivity without having to massively ramp up staff numbers at a time when skills shortages are biting deep everywhere?
When Katheren first met with Quanton’s team, she was buzzing with ideas for technology the organisation.
There was just one catch: Asthma New Zealand didn’t have the foundations in place. It’s ability to use data was severely limited, it’s ‘CRM’ system – such as it was – was three discrete Access databases, dating from the 1980s.
In Katheren’s own words, she was wanting to go shopping for furniture before the foundations had even been laid.
A traditional approach would limit the reach of the organisation and not be affordable. However, by adopting new ways of thinking and exponential tools and techniques, as well as the ability to leverage data and technology we could extend that reach, so we started laying those foundations.
Our first technology work with the organisation was the deployment of a modern CRM system which ensures they’re improving the productivity of the limited resources they have. By enabling nurses to enter data straight into the CRM while out of the office with clients, they’re saving the time of taking manual notes, travelling back to the office and entering the data into the system. That’s freeing them up to see more patients.
But the CRM is only one part of our work with Asthma New Zealand and its transformation work.
Our Operational Practice is also working with Katheren and her team.
Together, harnessing Exponential thinking, which includes elements of lean, agile and design thinking, we’ve helped create a plan for Asthma New Zealand to take the quantum leap into a new way of working.
They’ve now got a ‘plan on a page’ – working backwards from their five year goals and the overarching purpose of being able to reach as many patients as they can with education that inspires self-management, to provide a clear one-page strategy which is straight to the point on what they need to do to achieve their goal.
From there, all other technology initiatives will flow.
The CRM is only step one to the next initiative, which is a more robust and digitised solution and also enabling nurses to use modern technology to know their patient better, communicate with them more efficiently and for management to have access to the data to pull out different reports to inform their decision making.
Now, Asthma New Zealand has the infrastructure in place. And it’s ready to take flight on its transformation and exponential journey.