Radius Care is proud to present its new self-check-in kiosk – Florence. The digital kiosk is named after the pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale, who was known for making hospitals a cleaner and safer place to be. Florence is the first of its kind and offers unique advantages over the traditional aged care check-in experience in New Zealand.
Why design a new kiosk?
The pandemic created an urgent and overnight requirement to protect vulnerable residents from COVID-19 in all of Radius Care’s facilities. Each facility had to ensure that visitors and staff weren’t bringing in the virus. This meant that every visitor had to fill out a questionnaire and go through a temperature check before entering the building. This was resource heavy, required lots of paperwork, and facilities even needed a registered nurse to take people’s temperatures.
To reduce the administration and increase health and safety measures, management looked at ways to improve the process – both for staff and visitors. In the initial planning process, Radius Care evaluated many large technology companies that offered automated scanning solutions, but none offered a temperature scanner or self-health-declaration forms. Radius Care quickly realised that none of the existing technologies was adequate for the needs of its residents, as no company offered the features that an aged care facility needed. It had to create something brand new to protect its residents, their families, and its staff.
Bespoke solution
Florence Digital, a technology company with a stellar reputation from Hawkes Bay, had experience making self-serve and check-in kiosks for DHBs and even fast-food chains like KFC. Together Radius Care and Florence Digital created a completely new technology that integrated the information gathering and health screening functionalities needed, including a sign-in and sign-out procedure.
Once the prototype was finalised, Radius Care ran a pilot at its St Joan’s facility in Hamilton in late 2020. Both staff and visitors gave outstandingly positive feedback – it’s safe to say the pilot was a success. Florence Digital then polished the pilot device (aesthetically) and improved the temperature scanner, before installing the kiosks in all Radius Care facilities.
How does it work?
When staff and visitors enter one of the facilities the first thing they see is the Florence kiosk. The first time a person uses it, they check-in by filling in their personal details, answering COVID-19 related screening questions, and providing a temperature check. For all following visits, the visitor can easily sign in by scanning the personal QR code that they received on their first visit. This removes the need for filling in personal details for every visit - making the process quick and easy, cutting sign-in down from a few minutes to a few seconds. Should the government provide vaccination status QR codes, they can be easily added to Florence.
Helping to shape the future of healthcare
So far, the experience with the kiosk has been overwhelmingly positive. Radius Matua gets around 90-100 visitors a day and they’ve reported that people naturally go straight to the kiosk and appreciate the fast, easy, and contactless process.
From a company point of view, the adaptability of the kiosk has been appreciated. Radius Care can easily modify screening questions, and apply different criteria based on whether the facilities are in Alert Level 2 or 3 for example. And from a sustainability point of view, it allowed the company to eliminate the paper-intensive process of manually recording visitors at the start of the pandemic.
The Florence kiosks continue to ensure the health and safety of Radius Care’s residents, while also helping improve procedures and improve the company’s sustainability efforts. The programme has been a great success.
