Pregnancy, Birth and Baby video call

Enabling worried parents to talk face to face with a nurse when they need help

Pregnancy, Birth and Baby has a long reputation helping parents find the information and tools they need to re-assure worries or get help when needed. But as any parent knows there are times where you just need to talk face to face with a professional and get help any time of day.

Over-crowding of Emergency Departments means that isn’t a good solution, especially for an anxious parent and it can often be difficult to find a Home Visit GP when you need to. It seemed like an opportunity to implement a tele-health solution. Due to the vast rural areas in Australia, tele-health is fast becoming an essential part of the Australian health system.

Who was involved

The project was a complex implementation involving a core team from the Pregnancy, Birth and Baby service, a technology team from Attend Anywhere who delivered the tele-health technology platform and a product design and delivery team.

The product design and delivery team was responsible for developing an interface on the Pregnancy, Birth and Baby site that integrated with the Attend Anywhere system. It also had to deliver a clean, easy to use workflow that a worried parent could have confidence in and be able to use in a time of stress on whatever device was at hand.

My ROLE

I was the lead for the product design and delivery team. Working with stakeholders from both Pregnancy, Birth and Baby and Attend Anywhere to facilitate a technical solution that met the user and service needs as well as being intuitive and easy to use on any device.

My tasks included:

Technical product development, understanding complex technical issues (eg. video codecs and bit-rates) and how they could impact the service
Development of a mobile app and desktop experience in tandem, using a unified code approach
UI development and user testing to ensure a unobtrusive UI that allowed the call to take place unobscured but also gave access to controls easily when needed
Development of a text based chat experience to support the video experience and allow the sharing of links or to provide a fallback if there were any issues with sound or voice communication
Interviews with users and nurses to understand their concerns around using video call and how we could design to resolve those concerns

What we did

The first priority was to fully understand the needs of both the end users and the nurses and GPs who would be at either end of the video call. This involved a range of interviews with users from both groups and then role-playing how the calls could work using existing video technologies. This allowed us to build personas for each and keep their goals and concerns front of mind as we designed and developed the solution.

From there we began to develop prototypes for a web browser based call interface that would be fully responsive. On top of that we developed a landing page and integrated the queueing system from Attend Anywhere to begin testing a basic call flow with users.

We would then test these flows on a regular basis and bring feedback from users into the next iteration. One of the key bits of feedback was neither the parent or the nurse necessarily wanted video activated on launch, so we disabled it allowing them to voice and text chat for a short period first before agreeing to launch video.

Another key development task was brought about due to a lack of support for the WebRTC video technology on Safari browser. This meant we had to develop an app to support iPhone and iPad devices. Using a hybrid app framework we were able to develop this solution in tandem with the desktop solution using a branch of the main codebase. This approach allowed us to solve this challenge with no increase to timeline or budget for the project.

WHAT WE LEARNED AND DELIVERED

Understand the needs of the users
With new technologies, it is especially important to make sure there are no assumptions about how and why the users will use the product. You have to test your assumptions from a very early stage and then continue to challenge them at every step. Something you may not have thought of could be a massive barrier to entry, like in the example of starting the video call with video enabled for both users.
Others included ensuring the nurses were working in a quiet room with a curtained screen around them to ensure they had a calm, safe and non-distracting environment to present the parent.

Technology
From the complexities of video standards and how they are transmitted online to building a chat interface that allowed real time messaging there were huge technical learnings for everyone involved. The key learning was to rely on the technical community available online, especially with emerging technologies and their standards there will be others trying to solve the same problem and our developers contributed with others on more than one solution to improve the technologies involved for everyone.

What we delivered
We were all extremely proud of the product we delivered. Since its launch which had limited support the solution has been rolled out to more and more health services around Australia, delivering a service that is available every day of the year from 7am - midnight.

Many other tele-health solutions have launched in the years since but many are paid services and require a special app. You can find out more about this free, easy to use service from Pregnancy, Birth and Baby here: https://www.pregnancybirthbaby.org.au/about-video-call