Care Companion Digital Follow-up Service is the Turn.io based messaging service that enables Noora Health's local partners to connect with families post-discharge.
Anything you wish you knew before you started or that you learned and would like to share with others who might be facing a similar journey?
VICTORIA: When I was training as a social worker, all that I had in my mind was being on a field and dealing with people's problems and then solving those problems on the ground. I wasn't imagining that I would work with technology or with the Care Companion Digital Follow-up Service (CCDFS). Working with technology was a huge learning process, it was a challenge, and it is an opportunity that I was able to explore and I would like to thank Noora Health for providing me the space for doing all this.
Victoria G, Design Strategist, Noora Health
Listen: combining and improving 'out in the field' social work with technology.
Victoria's passion for connecting patients and care-givers with ongoing support and answers from the medical experts, and especially caring for patients' mental health has motivated her to work with Noora Health to scale their capacity. She is actively involved in collaboration with Turn.io to empower family members via chat as it has become a crucial part of ongoing patient care.
VICTORIA: The CCDFS helped me learn how to apply a user-centered approach from one location without visiting the fields during the Pandemic. I always imagined a user-centered approach to a particular problem could only happen when I connect with people on the ground. Of course, that's one way to understand our users better. At the same time, I have learned that technology can be used to solve more issues and challenges — to provide patients and care-givers with easy access to information.
How has the service evolved, and what are the critical new challenges or developments you face?
VICTORIA: CCDFS was a completely manual process in 2018 when we started. Then, we connected with doctors, and now we have dedicated resources to the project. We have automated many manual processes and made a lot of development to the service, we have developed our own protocols to answer our users, like categorize the questions into semi-emergency, emergency or normal questions — this helps us to provide the correct answers back faster.
VICTORIA: As I mentioned earlier, the CCDFS has improved much since the beginning. It has grown a lot and has to keep growing. Even though it has come a long way we still need a lot of development, and we have projects that are in the pipeline to implement. For example, we need an excellent dashboard that showcases our impact. We are trying to build a dashboard with manual methods, and now we would like to change this into an automated process.
We are also thinking of including more doctors and medical support executives into the system. To be in a much better position of answering the patient's and the caregiver's questions from the hospital and communities much faster and help change their behavior for their better recovery.
The first phase of the partnership with Turn.io has focused on maternal and newborn health. Medical professionals, health behaviour change specialists, and user experience designers design culturally appropriate message content, flows, and overall experience to deliver health messages for when families need them the most.
This rich content engagement enables Noora Health's local partners to reinforce health behaviour change in homes well after patients are discharged from hospital. This ensures a much more significant, lasting impact on communities and their health.
Thanks for sharing your journey with us. It is really inspiring to see how persistent and dedicated you and your team are.
VICTORIA: It was great to speak about my journey with CCDFS and Turn.io. I was fresher when I joined Noora Health, but the team provided opportunities to grab and work on something very interesting. Working with Turn.io on our CCDFS personally helped me gain more knowledge and learn new things. It is an amazing journey for me — as a social worker, I feel proud to be a part of this team.
Manish Manohar, Turn.io, Support
Inspired by Noora Health with product feedback and recommendations.
Building new features with Noora Health
As Noora and its partners work to expand these services to reach more patients, the focus will be on utilising key insights from Turn.io on how patients and families interact with Aarogya Seva to continue to improve service offerings in the maternal and child health space. The goal is to roll out the service across additional health condition areas (cardiac, general inpatient, oncology) by 2021, reaching more than one million families.
