COVID-19 saw significant and ongoing change across the health sector. No business may have changed more than Five Faces, who pivoted from digital signage into healthcare to take on the challenge of transforming the patient experience.
Tell us the Five Faces story and how you’ve got to where you are today?
Five Faces is a digital health start up 14 years in the making. We were founded in 2010 and for a decade we were a digital signage business. But COVID-19 presented an opportunity for our business to pivot and move into healthcare.
Suddenly we could see how we could make a real difference. We ended up supporting the mass vaccination centre at Sydney Olympic Park, where we handled the appointment booking and queue management for around 14,000 visitors a day and around 1.8million vaccinations in total. We also provided digital solutions for quarantine hotels and visitor management.
We’ve taken these learnings and built them into our DX5 Framework – officially launched last month at Digital Health Festival – and our Digital Front Door solution.
How does your technology help patients and practices?
As we emerged from COVID, we quickly saw that across the health ecosystem the patient experience had not really been digitised. Many things remained paper based. Sydney Health Local District recognised this needed to be improved and so together we set out to build a patient engagement platform. Florence, as it was named, has since been rolled out over 110 clinics.
The whole idea of our solution is to streamline the process for the patient and for the staff. Our technology – the digital front door – improves the patient experience, digitising paper forms and manual workflows, providing just-in-time communication and reminders to patients, and automating check-in and queue management.
Our technology relies on configuration. This means that even the least tech-savvy staff can create workflows, change branding, build digital forms – and create tailored patient journeys right down to the clinic level. This is what’s required in healthcare, you can’t force clinics to conform to set way of doing things, you need to accommodate their individual needs and requirements. This makes change management much faster as well.
What have been the challenges in transitioning into the health sector?
The sector is very embedded in their ways of doing things. I would also say the consumer
journey is lagging behind other industries. It’s still siloed, manual and inconsistent. Patients don’t feel that their time is valued or that they are empowered.
We want to ensure that digital health experiences are on par with other industries – clean, simple experiences that anticipate what patients need and help their journeys.
Of course, we know that healthcare systems are more challenging and complex than most other industries. But as a digital health industry, we must protect patients from this complexity, and provide them with an easy experience. Technology can do this now.
Where can we see your solutions in practice. As mentioned, Sydney Local Health District uses our digital front door in 110 clinics so far. Bupa Health Insurance uses our queue management system in their Australian retail stores and the Melbourne Sexual Health Centre is another great example. They used to have patients lining up out the door and filling in forms that had to be inputted manually. We have now digitised this process, streamlining the patient experience and freeing up staff time. The great thing about our solution is it can be used in large public hospital systems through to really specialist, individual clinics.
Tell us about your experience in working with the DHCRC?
As a vendor, it has been very, very collaborative working with Sydney University, Sydney Local Health District and the DHCRC. The Florence research project involves the evaluation of the patient engagement solution at Sydney Dental Hospital, which sees on average 12,000 patients per month. The research project with the DHCRC and partners is now looking at patient and staff experience outcomes.
There has been very little research in Australia into the use of digital health technology to improve patient experience and wait times. We genuinely want to learn from the research findings to hear from patients directly about what does and doesn’t work for them.
Would is your vision for how the consumer journey looks in the future?
Our vision is to see the digital front door make access to healthcare more consistent and streamlined. So that if you’re a patient receiving care at multiple facilities, you’re having a consistent experience. And, like the airline industry, you’ve got all your information at the tip of your fingertips, whether this is reminders about appointments, or checking in with a patient passport like you do when catching a flight.
For us it is a combination of physical and digital – “phyigital”. You have to have those touch points for patients that they can actually see when they are in the physical environment – our digital signage still has its role to play – but they also need the digital enablement on their phone to be in control throughout the whole process.
