Northern Health Improves Patient Access to Emergency Care with Virtual Emergency Department on AWS

Every year, thousands of patients in Melbourne, Australia, receive healthcare services at Northern Health. Northern Health operates Melbourne’s busiest emergency department, treating more than 110,000 patients annually. Despite efforts to increase capacity, the number of patients seeking health services continues to surpass available resources, leading to overcrowding in many health facilities. This presented challenges at the height of the pandemic when increasing numbers of patients needed emergency care. Dr. Loren Sher, program director of the Virtual Emergency Department at Northern Health, says, “Our emergency department was overflowing, causing long delays.”

Additionally, the hospital was understaffed when clinicians and nurses had to isolate, leading to increased workloads for on floor staff. Both problems contributed to poor patient experiences and staff burnout. 

To address these issues, Northern Health sought to transform existing patient registration and clinical tracking capabilities in the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department (VVED). The VVED allows patients to receive non-critical emergency healthcare at home through remote registration and video consultations with VVED staff. Northern Health also wanted to provide a multilingual channel for patients within the VVED to support better access for the diverse residents of the region. The organization engaged a technology provider able to quickly build a fit- for-purpose virtual solution, one capable of scaling as Victoria met new waves of COVID-19 and other illnesses.

After evaluating several virtual healthcare technologies in early 2022, Northern Health chose to work with The Clinician, a New Zealand-based digital health company and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner. ZEDOC, The Clinician’s integrated digital health platform, uses AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to engage patients at scale while keeping their identifiable and sensitive information secure. ZEDOC also uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and AWS security services, allowing patients to provide information to providers with confidence and in their native language via ZEDOC’s engagement intelligence. Mike Merry, chief technology officer at The Clinician, says, “Using AWS’s range of services, we can engage with patients where and how it best suits them, while ensuring good custodianship of the data with Northern Health’s security requirements”.

The Clinician configured ZEDOC to provide the VVED with a digital patient intake solution and clinical tracking dashboard to allow timely access to virtual emergency care for patients in their own homes. The dashboard allows Northern Health clinicians and the clerical nursing team to view the real-time status of patients. Available information includes patient demographics and current complaints or ailments. The dashboards allow Northern Health to triage patients more effectively, and subsequently deliver timely, personalized telehealth consultations.

Eight weeks after engaging The Clinician, Northern Health went live with the customized, fit-for-purpose digital front door solution via the ZEDOC platform, featuring a screening and registration form available in 22 different languages. This helps Northern Health better serve its diverse community, which includes residents from more than 185 countries. Because of the scalability of ZEDOC on AWS, Northern Health can now serve over 300 patients virtually per day instead of 50 previously. More than 600 clinical and clerical staff use the new solution, accessing it either onsite or remotely. Around 73,000 patients have used the service for virtual emergency care since the launch.