Better Health Group is creating a fully digital seamless patient experience using the new Centrik platform. 

Christchurch based Better Health Group (BHG) was established in 2009 with a goal to deliver a more sustainable future for general practice.

BHG director David Jones says, “our core purpose is to have a better and more consistent patient experience and be able to communicate with patients more effectively in both directions”.

The group has invested in substantial infrastructure to support that vision, but found the patient-facing technology was “clunky”.

BHG is now working with health tech start-up Centrik to deliver the consumer-facing features of their new cloud-based platform.“This was an opportunity to see how we could do things differently using native mobile and really leading-edge technology,” Jones says.

The Centrik platform will provide the group with a patient portal (including two-way communication with the practice), check in functionality, patient messaging and notifications, as well as payments, all in a single application.

BHG is live with Centrik under a Beta release and the technology will ultimately be rolled out across the group of 70,000 enrolled patients as the Better Health Outcomes app. 

Fellow director of BHG Dr Graham McGeoch says in the future the platform will enable interaction with home monitoring devices and allow patients to share their medical records with people involved in their care, if they choose.

He says the platform will also enable more proactive care planning and for patients to be greater participants in their care.

Jones says, “we are seeing a winter approaching where we are going to see overwhelming demand, so we have to get a bit smarter and use some technology to be able to cope with the workload effectively, and some of that is going to be looking after people in the community.”

“This kind of technology is going to be key to enable us to provide that remote care.”

Centrik has been spun out of Christchurch company Webtools. Webtools Health chief executive Harry Hawke says, “working in the health sector, we too often hear of examples of archaic systems or processes that act as a real barrier to the delivery of health services for patients. 

“Our whole driver and mission is to design and build technology that is truly human-centric.”