Description:

In Aotearoa you can date, bank, and travel on your phone, but when it comes to seeing a doctor, you still have to sit in a waiting room or move across town in gridlock traffic to get to your appointment. Simultaneously, there are weekly news stories about overflowing Emergency Departments and burnt out clinicians. Tend is reimagining the future of primary healthcare as a full service GP practice that is digitally led.
Our app and medical centres are designed to meet customer needs and rethink the workforce experience. In other parts of the world consumers have access to modern, digitally-native healthcare services, and the health workforce has systems which make their jobs easier. Yet in Aotearoa we see weekly media stories about the pressure the system and its workforce are under. There has been massive underinvestment in technology, systems are incompatible, your health record is not available to you as a consumer and our health system is struggling to respond to the needs of the community. This is reflected in a growing inequity of health outcomes between different population groups based on where people live and ethnic backgrounds. It's also reflected in clear data showing GP's are burnt out with nearly 50% of GP's planning to retire within 10 years.
To work on fixing these problems we started from a blank slate, performing our own primary research, surveying thousands of Kiwis with Colmar Brunton – prototyping, usability testing and iterating. We discovered that the most common pain points of primary care, for customers and clinicians, would require us to invent new digital products, physical spaces and operational processes. This included better accessibility, smarter, and timely contact channels (less phone calls and faxes), better booking, payment and post appointment follow up and making all this simple and convenient for our clinical workforce.
Key findings from consumers were; lack of followup post appointments, access to appointments in a timely manner, doctors running late and lack of visibility for common healthcare interactions. The Tend App is designed to make all of your primary healthcare jobs-to-be-done available from your phone.
Since our last best awards entry, our app now enables booking of 41 services, from childhood immunisations to smears and prostate screening. We send a notification when your prescription has actually been sent to your pharmacy by a prescriber or if your prescriber needs to see you before repeating medication. For patients on long term medication, our app reminds you before you've run out and allows you to request and pay for repeat prescriptions. Appointment notes are sent automatically after a consultation. Once a clinician reviews results from lab tests, specialists and other kinds of investigations you receive a push notification allowing you to review the result along with clinical comments, and ask follow up questions and clarifications from our central customer service team. We sped up basic processes, like enrolling, re-ordering medication, getting contraception and understanding what that last blood pressure reading meant, all while opening more clinics, and onboarding thousands of new patients.