In the middle of a pandemic, being agile to protect the needs of customers and the community is the new normal for organisations. Especially in the high-risk environments of hospitals and health care.

As one of the largest healthcare providers and charities in Australia, UnitingCare Queensland (UnitingCare) is also one of the State’s largest employers. With a workforce that spans 17,400 staff and more than 9,000 volunteers, the organisation extends compassionate healthcare services to more than 430,000 people.

New COVID-19 tracing protocols 

With hospitals and healthcare services in many locations across South East Queensland, UnitingCare are directly affected by COVID-19 government contact tracing protocols. With the anxiety of the pandemic lingering in the forefront of everyone’s mind and cases rising in neighboring states, UnitingCare needed to demonstrate to Queensland Health that they can respond quickly and efficiently to second wave cases in Queensland. This meant digitising their existing manual contact tracing processes in UnitingCare operated facilities that currently served upwards of 2,000 check-ins per hour, across the entire state of Queensland.

Triggerfish for speed & certainty

Having already evaluated an option for an off-the-shelf screening app to meet their requirements, UnitingCare decided to leverage the scale of their existing Sitecore environment to meet their strict security, data and privacy mandates, giving them the ability to deliver quickly, and serve them better in future. With a strong pre-existing relationship in place, they reached out to Triggerfish for help.

In just 72 hours, Triggerfish delivered the COVID-19 screening app on UnitingCare’s existing Sitecore environment. Under the hood, the app takes advantage of Sitecore Experience Forms, Experience Database, Dataweavers, Microsoft Event Grid, Azure SQL, PowerBI and Security Centre.

Using both physical and device QR codes, the COVID-19 screening app tracks visitors and staff through check-in stations in the entryway of Hospitals and health service locations managed by UnitingCare. Microsoft PowerBI is used by the UnitingCare head office to visualize check-ins by location, submission day, brand, location, and role. The PowerBI dashboard also presents total check-ins, unique users, and question anomalies.

As the business was discovering in real-time the requirements for each location, the flexibility within both the Sitecore & Microsoft Azure environments allowed for tailored rollouts of the COVID-19 screening apps to Buderim Private Hospital, St Andrews War Memorial Hospital, The Wesley Hospital & St Stephens Hospital over a 7-day period.

Screening data in less than 30-minutes

After upgrading their legacy, paper-based tracing procedures, UnitingCare are now highly responsive to the needs of the public, with the access to drill-down on screening data for emergency tracing purposes taking less than 30-minutes for the request. The business also has the ability to scale the experience across all the UnitingCare group of brands in the future.