A team of national health clinicians with support from the HSE’s Office of the CIO designed a four-step process to provide:
1) rapid notification of patient test results with advice,
2) collection of close contacts from positive patents,
3) rapid notification of those close contacts to either isolate and/or get tested, and
4) daily notification of those close contacts reminding them during the duration of their recommended isolation.
Working closely with the HSE clinicians and the Office of the CIO, Kaptea integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM with Twilio’s programmable-SMS service to automate messages to patients in each of the four steps. Using Twilio Studio features Kaptea ensured the correct phone number was verified (using Twilio Lookup) and designed different message flows based on patient test results and the patient journey as they discussed their case with the contact center advisor.
“Kaptea not only built a solution to meet the messaging requirements of the HSE’s COVID-19 Contact Tracing Programme but also provided on-going day-to-day support of the solution. Kaptea provided detailed analytics and worked with Twilio customer support to ensure the quality and consistency of the service met the HSE’s high standards.”
– HSE ICT Corporate Delivery Programme Manager
Programmable SMS – Explained
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the HSE Contact Management Programme has kept the Irish population informed about their testing results within an average of 24 hours. Twilio’s SMS messaging service sent over 22.366 million messages with a 99.23% delivery success.
Integrating Twilio’s Programmable SMS API with Microsoft Dynamics 365 allowed the HSE to scale to 200,000 messages on one of the busiest days of the pandemic.
Working closely with the HSE, Kaptea service constantly evolved the messages and the Twilio Studio flows based on new policies put in place by the Contact Tracing Programme leadership.
The Result
The HSE published a research article substantiating the results of the Irish national contract tracing programme and summarized the following conclusions:
Using the Quality Improvement (QI) approach, the Health Service Executive (HSE) successfully established and scaled up a Contact Management Programme that rapidly notified results to people and traced their close contacts. CMP contributed to the success of the Irish health service in managing the pandemic. CMP slowed COVID-19 transmission and lessened the impact on health services capacity.
Details of the research paper can be found here.