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“Breaking the mould of traditional healthcare websites” is how Lyle Chetty describes the goal for Kaweka Health’s website.
Kaweka Health is a private surgical facility being built in Hastings that will open in 2022 and create more operating capacity in the Hawke’s Bay region.
Lyle, who is director of digital services for the hospital, says the website will play an important role in delivering a supportive patient journey, from pre-surgery through to recovery.
“Surgery is a major event and it can be intimidating for people. With our website, we want to ensure we explain procedures clearly and in lay terms, and we make it easy for people to find the information they need at the consulting stage and during the recovery process.”
When Lyle was selecting a tech partner to build the website infrastructure he says the focus was on finding a company that could build a modern, robust platform that could adapt and evolve over time, and support the needs of Kaweka’s patients and clinicians now and in the future.
Datacom stood out as the right choice for Lyle because we were a big player with a track record of providing reliable infrastructure and — after working for them as a project manager for nearly three years — he knew he could “totally trust” the team.
At the outset of the project, the project team from Datacom sat down with the Kaweka team and asked them what they wanted to achieve.
“That was a chance to really communicate what we wanted to give our customers and our clinicians. Datacom really encouraged us to think about what that could look like without feeling constrained by scope or budget.”
“With that blue-sky approach we were able to come up with a list of functionality for now and the things we want to build in the future.”
One of the first ‘special builds’ to support the patient journey is a body map, where people can learn about the different types of surgery that relate to different parts of the body. To do this Datacom generated a React application which was turned into a WordPress plugin.
In the future the team will look to build a 3D map of the facilities — so patients can take a look around and orient themselves before they arrive — and will enable connectivity with wearable health devices to help monitor and support post-surgery rehab and recovery.
The project team has also focused on delivering value behind the scenes. In a move that keeps costs down and offers a lower-power “greener” approach, the web solution uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) serverless compute engines for containers hosting the website which means computing power is only used when visitors come to the website.
Building the Kaweka Health website has been a team effort with Datacom working closely with local Hawke’s Bay digital agency Caddie.
Datacom has focused on infrastructure while the Caddie team has focused on the front-end UX and Lyle says having the two companies working together has been a really positive experience.
“One of our aims is to work with as many local suppliers and vendors as possible, and Datacom has really supported that by working collaboratively with Caddie. The communication across the teams has been first-class and we’re really happy with what they have been able to deliver together.”
