Vensa Health’s solution helps GPs focus on health targets
Auckland, NZ., December 14, 2015 – General Practice (GP) clinics around the country are using Vensa Health’s (www.vensa.com) innovative practice-patient solution to connect with their community and to help improve health target performance in
the four government health priority areas including smoking cessation, immunisations, heart, and cervical screening.
Vensa Health CEO Ahmad Jubbawey says, “Our vision is to better connect practices with their community to improve patient
wellbeing. Over 65% of General Practices in New Zealand currently use Vensa to deliver health messages, appointment,
screening and medication reminders to over 3 million Kiwis a year.
“We know timely access to health services is critical, whether its children receiving their immunisation dose on time or
women undergoing breast screening to help detect cancer early. We’re very committed to helping GPs and other health
professionals communicate with their patients more effectively so they can improve their health targets.”
A consistently high performer for health targets is East Health Trust with 21 GP clinics in the Howick, Pakuranga,
Beachlands, Maraetai and Clevedon regions.
CEO Loretta Hansen says, “Achieving health targets requires the diligence of practices and our support to employ a
variety of different elements to achieve goals. We encourage the use of tools like Vensa’s to help improve performance.”
East Health GP practices use Vensa system in a multi-facilitated way to deliver appointment, screening and medication
reminder, and health messages direct to the patient via text message and interactive mobile content delivery.
Jill Hall, Practice Manager of Howick House Medical Centre says, “It’s proving a very effective way to not just deliver
lab results or recall reminders but also to let patients know why it’s important to get a diabetes check or cervical
smear. It’s also a really useful tool to help with smoking cessation as we can take people through the ABC smoking
cessation process. We’ve seen a marked improvement in our smoking targets as a result.”
Dennis Baty, Chief Operating Officer of ProCare with over 180 GP practices across the greater Auckland region says,
“Achieving health targets requires ongoing effort and we’re always looking for innovative ways to support our practices
to gain efficiencies, lift performance and achieve health targets. We’ve seen the impact Vensa’s technology is having
and we’re encouraging more of our practices to use technology solutions for patient contact.”
Louise McCarthy Senior Portfolio Manager - Primary Care at Counties Manukau Health says supporting PHOs and GP clinics
to help achieve primary care health targets such as ‘Better Help for Smokers to Quit’ is important work.
In the Counties Manukau Health area, the DHB and the five PHOs have agreed that sustainable activity and increased
cessation support will be the focus for the 2015-16 year.
McCarthy says, “By working alongside the PHOs we can really focus effort. Smoking is the single largest cause of
preventable death worldwide, killing an estimated 5000 people in New Zealand every year and affecting the quality of
life for thousands more. The cost to the health system that can be directly attributed to smoking has been estimated to
be at least $1.9 billion a year,” she says.
Jubbawey says, “It’s encouraging to see the Metro Auckland PHOs and DHBs exceed the health targets in many areas and we
are committed to continuing to support their efforts with our technology. Our newly released TXT2Remind 4.0 has a range
of improvements specifically designed to help automate the health target process, such as offering brief advice for
smoking.”
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