Revolutionising the way you communicate with your care team!

We understand how important it is to stay in contact with Care Professionals when they’re on the go. It’s not only essential to coordinate efficiently when last minute changes impact rotas and require visit cover, but to ensure Care Professionals have all the up to date information they need about their Care Recipients to delivery truly personalised and responsive care.

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That’s why we squad worked agencies just like yours to create a simple, but effective tool that lets you:

• Save time by sending messages straight to one, many or all of your care team in a matter of seconds.
• Improve responsiveness by instantly updating your team on important and urgent changes.
• View read-receipts to guarantee peace of mind that important messages have been opened.
• Audit with ease, by centralising all your previous messages in one place.

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These are just a few of the ways you can benefit from Birdie’s new Message Centre. C‍lick here for more information on what's included.

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So why did we build it?

What we choose to build is often inspired by feedback, because we want to build products that are solving real day-to-day problems for our partners. We’ve heard from so many of our partners that they’d love a communication tool that lets them send real-time updates to Care Professionals’ phones - which is exactly why we set out to build one!

We began by researching and trying to understand the challenges they face when maintaining effective communication throughout the day. We learned from partners that they use a range of messaging apps to contact Care Professionals but as they grew, they found it difficult to juggle multiple tools and wanted a centralised hub that was easy to sift through and audit.

We also discovered a number of partners were spending lots of time messaging individuals within their care teams. This meant that good communication was coming at a cost, which didn’t sit right with us. We decided to create a feature that allows you to send as many updates to as many Care Professionals as you want, in a matter of minutes.

Finally, we heard directly from Care Professionals that keeping in contact with office teams was key to ensuring they have all the important information needed to carry out visits.

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How did we build it?

Once we had defined the challenges being faced by care agencies, our Workforce Experience team committed to building a product that would alleviate these pains, while being easy-to-use and not distracting Care Professionals from the vital work they do.

The team includes a senior product manager, a designer, a number of software engineers who all worked together to flesh out for how they could solve the communication pains our partners were facing. They worked closely with partners to share the designs are finalised and prototypes they created to ensure usability was front of mind throughout the process - the finished product was a Message Centre that can be accessed seamlessly from anywhere within Birdie, and notifications that appear within the Birdie app in real-time, to ensure urgent updates can be quickly accessed and read.

Another essential focus for every team is safety - from an early stage our engineers carefully assessed any technical risks involved and when it was time to get building, our Clinical Safety Officer and and Data Protection Officer was consulted in order for us to progress.

In the case of Birdie’s Message Centre, the team knew they had to protect our partners’ privacy and that of their Care Recipients, so we ensured that while notifications appear on a smartphone screen, the message is hidden to conceal any potentially sensitive information and only appears once the Birdie app has been opened.

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What did we do next?

An essential part of successfully launching any feature, let alone one as impactful as our Message Centre, is testing, testing and more testing! One way we do this internally is through a process known as ‘dogfooding’ - where we get get as many Birdies from across the company to play around and test out different scenarios using the feature. Not only do we get the benefit of a lots of fresh pairs of eyes, we can use the expertise of the whole team, from marketing to support, to aid in decision making. For more information on how Birdie builds new features, click here.

Then we do this externally, in what we call a beta. This is where we allow a smaller group of partners to test out the feature and provide us with detailed feedback on how it works in their day to day. This is an important step as we check that new tools are working as intended by our partners and allows us to make final improvements to make the end product even more impactful. In this case, we used feedback from the beta to increase the character limit of messages so you can add even more detail to your updates!

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How do I benefit?

After many months of research, designing, building and testing, our Message Centre is now available as part of the Birdie Platform to partners using Advanced and Plus plans! Everyone in Birdie is incredibly excited can’t wait for you to dive in! If you’re interested in learning more on accessing this tool please book a demo to learn more!