Early in 2020, Visiba Care partnered with Livewell Southwest to launch a virtual clinic to support their health and social care services across Devon and Cornwall. With the rapid spread of Covid-19 across the UK, the demand for online consultations has risen sharply, and Livewell Southwest has promptly scaled up their digital operations and provision of remote consultations.

Michael Oliver, Project Manager at Livewell South, gave an insight into their digital transformation journey and how it unfolds amidst Covid-19.

“With the COVID-19 crisis we have increased the number of users 27 times; we’ve had over 754 registered users now, whereas 3 weeks ago, we only had 20. Visiba Care has come at an absolutely perfect time for us.

The speed that Visiba has worked during the Covid-19 crisis has been incredible. Within hours, we had a new reception set up called Rapid Connect that we are using for staff across our organisation when they are unable to deliver face-to-face assessments and interventions. In the space of 2 weeks, we trained over 600 people to use the system. Visiba supported us with training material. We delivered the sessions online as we were unable to deliver them face-to-face.

When people can’t come to us, we can still support them virtually – and this is a standard offer now, we can at least see you and talk to you face-to-face. Amidst Covid-19, that gives them the vibe that we’re doing the best we can do. I am encouraging the district nursing team to try and get patients to use it as well. So if, for example, the patients have wounds, they can point the smartphone camera at the wound and the nurse can give really good advice as well. Our use cases, including dentistry, occupational therapy, and physical teams, have grown in the past few weeks; We have nearly 70 consultations per day at the moment and this will keep growing.”

And there is optimism that there will be long-term benefits arising from the response to the Covid-19 crisis. Michael said:

“We are making more progress in two weeks than we would have done in 6 months in terms of staff engagement with virtual consultations. From this crisis we are going to give lots of people a view of virtual clinics as well and get them to think about how they are going to use it when this is all done and things are back to normal.”

Read the full story on the Visiba website.