With the health sector under pressure to service growing demand and complexity, telehealth services provider Whakarongorau Aotearoa was keen to enhance its capacity to help people seeking advice.
It worked with long-term partner Microsoft to modernise its operations by becoming an anchor tenant of Microsoft's New Zealand cloud region, New Zealand North, and implementing the Microsoft Fabric analytics platform.
55% of health needs resolved at first contact
1.6 million people positively impacted annually
As the social enterprise running New Zealand’s government-funded telehealth services, Whakarongorau Aotearoa is an essential part of New Zealand’s health system, and is a leading triage, prevention, and wellbeing provider.
Since its founding in 2015, Whakarongorau Aotearoa has grown significantly and now provides more than 35 health and mental health services across seven digital channels. These include Healthline, 1737 – Need to Talk?, Quitline, and New Zealand’s sexual harm service, Safe to Talk.
For those who contact one of the services for support, Whakarongorau Aotearoa ensures people receive the support and advice needed, no matter which service they contact, with a view to every door being the right door to support tāngata whai ora (people seeking wellness).
Annually, Whakarongorau Aotearoa services positively impact the wellbeing of more than 1.6 million people, which equates to one in four New Zealanders.
Whakarongorau Aotearoa handled more than 2.2 million contacts in the year ending June 2023, resolving 55% of health needs at first contact and diverting 89% of contacts away from emergency services. This significantly reduced pressure on hospitals while ensuring people received the right care at the right time.
“With the entire health sector under pressure to meet growing community demand and complexity, our goal is to enhance our capacity to help our amazing clinicians connect with people in need of help as quickly as possible,” says Anna Campbell, Chief Support Services Officer of Whakarongorau Aotearoa. “This included providing our team with better access to data and insights for better decision-making.”
The organisation also wanted to move from inflexible, on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-based solution. This would make its systems more flexible and scalable, and open the door to further modernisation. Additionally, it wanted to strengthen its data sovereignty by ensuring that data was stored in New Zealand.
To address these challenges, the organisation embarked on a bold digital transformation program to modernise its operations, working with long-term partner Microsoft to achieve its goals while maintaining users’ privacy.
“In a clinical environment, it’s very important to us that we’re working with trusted partners,” says Campbell.
“With the entire health sector under pressure to meet growing community demand and complexity, our goal is to enhance our capacity to help our amazing clinicians connect with people in need of help as quickly as possible. This included providing our team with better access to data and insights for better decision-making.”
Anna Campbell, Chief Support Services Officer, Whakarongorau Aotearoa
To lay the strong foundations needed for digital innovation, Whakarongorau Aotearoa chose to become an anchor tenant of Microsoft’s new hyperscale cloud region, New Zealand North, which opened in December 2024. New Zealand North is Microsoft’s first cloud region in New Zealand and represents a significant milestone in the nation’s digital transformation.
Moving to New Zealand North involved transitioning the organisation’s core telehealth platform, provided by Valentia, to an integrated platform hosted in the cloud by Microsoft. This enhanced the organisation’s ability to deliver essential health services and digital care at scale. Using Microsoft’s cloud to reduce friction in systems and processes has also opened the door for accelerated innovation, which will help deliver better outcomes for users of Whakarongorau Aotearoa services.
Specifically, the move from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud-based solution enables greater flexibility and adaptability, enabling the company to make improvements and modernise its digital services significantly faster. The move also supports stability and scalability, ensuring its systems can handle the large volumes of data required to support the organisation’s goal of delivering integrated, predictive and personalised care to users.
“Moving to New Zealand North was an amazing opportunity for us,” says Campbell. ”The idea of maintaining authority and control of our data in New Zealand is very important to us. We’re dealing with people’s sensitive and confidential information, so we must manage that in a way we can feel proud of.”
Working with Microsoft on the transition enabled Whakarongorau Aotearoa to draw on Microsoft’s strategic and tactical expertise to help build its internal knowledge and skills. The partners also collaborated closely with Valentia Technologies, a long-standing strategic cloud transformation partner to Whakarongorau Aotearoa. The teams’ combined efforts allowed the organisation to reduce the time needed to transfer around 6TB of customer relationship management data and associated infrastructure to the cloud from 24 to 11 hours.
“This partnership enabled us to support all the tāngata whai ora who called us that day,” says Campbell. “This is significant from both a business perspective and for the wellbeing of the nation.”
With data management critical to the successful operation of its services, Whakarongorau Aotearoa recognised that it needed to replace its legacy data analytics tool with a more flexible and intuitive platform.
“Our previous bespoke tool had become hard to manage over time and was close to reaching the end of its life,” says Shane Jensen, Senior Project Manager at Whakarongorau Aotearoa. “We needed a more flexible, dynamic and adaptable platform. After looking at a few different options, it became clear that Microsoft Fabric offered the best way forward for us as an organisation. It’s been a positive shift in terms of data accessibility and its ability to gather insights.”
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft’s unified data management and analytics platform. It operates as a data lake, consolidating various data sources in one place and helping to streamline operations and generate insights. Its intuitive interface makes it easier for team members to access and digest data and generate insights. This has helped improve day-to-day decision-making and enhance frontline employees’ ability to deliver integrated, personalised and predictive care.
Having successfully completed these foundational projects on time and under budget, Whakarongorau Aotearoa is now focused on modernising its technology to fulfil its goal of seamlessly and securely supporting more individuals, wherever and whenever they need assistance.
The organisation also plans to integrate advanced AI tools to enhance operational efficiency and service delivery. This includes rolling out Microsoft 365 Copilot to its employees, significantly enhancing their capacity to complete tasks and boosting productivity.
Initially deployed to pockets of the business that expressed interest in enhancing their skills, the AI-powered tool has now been rolled out throughout the organisation, with training and additional support from the Microsoft team.
“Microsoft has been wonderful in terms of providing us with training sessions and resources across all levels of the organisation, including speaking with our board,” says Campbell. “It has been very active in helping build our knowledge and internal capability, and making sure that we have appropriate governance.”
The organisation is also developing an AI-powered knowledge bot to help employees access information more easily.
“It’s essentially a knowledge bot to look across all our existing policies and standard operating procedures,” says Jensen. “Any of our team can engage with it and find information they might need to access or how to do something.”
The company is also exploring using ChatGPT 4o in Azure for real-time call transcription and sentiment analysis.
Whakarongorau Aotearoa has already delivered significant capacity improvement and time savings. The organisation has also saved around $10,000 per month since the transition.
“The move paves the way for a much better system, and better development and performance overall, through further modernising in Azure,” says Jensen. “This includes enabling a cloud-native and zero-trust environment, moving towards a DevOps approach and harnessing the value of our Azure apps. We will also be able to further reduce downtime and any business interruption during change or upgrades.”
Campbell hopes to see further improvements as the organisation leans further into AI. In the meantime, she has the following advice for organisations embarking on similar digital transformations: “Look for partners whose values align with yours and view the relationship as more than transactional. In working with Microsoft, we’ve seen that it is just as excited about our intentions and values as we are, and sometimes it describes them better than we do.”
Campbell also suggests raising any potential problems with partners early to optimise the value of their contribution.
“In addition to providing resources and support, the team at Microsoft helped challenge our thinking and demonstrated thought leadership and a learning culture. This is something that’s embedded into Microsoft and has been phenomenal.”
The partnership with Microsoft supports the healthcare organisation’s vision of enhanced digital care that maintains clinical excellence while improving accessibility for all New Zealanders, particularly those in underserved communities.
Vanessa Sorenson, Managing Director, Microsoft New Zealand, believes Whakarongorau Aotearoa is well placed for ongoing digital transformation, which will not only benefit the organisation but all New Zealanders.
“The Whakarongorau Aotearoa transformation is an example of how technology, when used with empathy and purpose, can deliver meaningful impact at scale,” she says. “This partnership goes beyond tech. Instead, it’s about supporting all New Zealanders to access support and advice when and how they need it. We’re incredibly proud to be on this journey with Whakarongorau.”
To discover more about the New Zealand North Data Centre and the available services, download the New Zealand cloud region partner playbook.
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