If I had to select one prominent theme that we are approached about at least twice a week, it would be the topic of “Digital Transformation in Community Services”.

Firstly, what is this?

Quite simply, digital transformation is the effective use of digital tools to transform existing processes for the purposes of driving efficiency. Within community services, there are so many opportunities to connect, communicate and engage with customers that are driving meaningful results.

Consumers of health care are now, more than ever, expecting to interact with information, people and services in an autonomous and simple way. The challenge ahead for a lot of the groups we work with is the sheer volume of disparate data/platforms and non-consumer friendly information. Collecting, centralising, transforming and visualising this information is at the core of what we do at hayylo.

What is the real value of Digital Transformation in community services?

To answer this question, I think its best to draw on some of the metrics we see across our customers.  Across our customers, we see an average of over 20% reduction of inbound calls from customers and family members when they have access to the most common source of questions. These are predominantly related to schedules, changes and generally the desire for customers to know who is coming to see them and when.

Aside from this direct measure, we often see indirect impacts such as increased efficiency across the customer’s service and scheduling teams due to the ability to enter what we call “focus mode”.  By reducing the volume of customer enquiries via phone, we have seen an increase in team efficiency of over 18%.  At a high level, this means teams have 1/5 more of their day back to focus on their customers. Putting aside optimisation, and looking forward into other natural business drivers, digital is forecast to represent over 36% of business by 2020 (Gartner CIO agenda). While we could expect a slower adoption curve within community services ( due to specific customer demographics), what I see as a compelling story, is the need to start this process now.

This can be seen through a rapidly changing trend in preferred contact methods for customers. We find that over 50% of elderly customers using digital channels to communicate with their providers, opt to not receive phone calls preferring to self-service and receive automated updates via apps / digital channels.  From a product perspective, at hayylo, we focus on this precise experience.  Our goal is to help our customers, customers, engage with their health and services, in a way that is suited to their changing needs.