Personify Care’s digital pathways selected to empower communities with timely, cultural, and linguistically relevant health information.
Ensuring that culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities have appropriate and timely health information, that’s relevant to their health journey, is a challenge COVID-19 thrust into the spotlight.
Throughout the pandemic, health services were challenged with language and literacy barriers, hampered with the focus on traditional media channels, a lack of trust in agencies and competing sources of (miss)information. All of these factors led to lower vaccination rates in CALD communities than the general population.
At the COVID-19 Innovation Fund Showcase, Personify Care shared the digital pathways created to support hard to reach communities.
Importantly, these pathways enable members of a particular CALD community to receive an invitation from a trusted member of their community to a clinically validated pathway, in their language, designed for their cultural group and is personalised to their type of vaccination and their vaccination status.
Diagram of the relationship between an individual, their culture and health factors that need to be factored into culturally and linguistically appropriate Digital Patient Pathway
By connecting health services with health consumers, Personify Care delivers culturally and linguistically appropriate digital pathways that require no apps or special hardware. Consumers simply select their preferred language on registration.
The digital pathways connect consumers with personalised education and multimedia health information as well as information about the latest vaccination advice.
Ken Saman, CEO of Personify Care shared at the Showcase that,
A new approach was needed to decentralise the sharing of information – what’s unique about the CALD pathways is that the consumer can initiate or opt-in themselves, be invited by a health service, or be invited by a member of their community.
By leveraging the trust and network effect within multicultural communities, the pathways enable community leaders to share access to reliable vaccination and health information within their community. While this need was driven in response to COVID-19, we see significant opportunities for community driven digital pathways like this beyond the pandemic response.” says Mr Saman.
This project was supported by the COVID Innovation Fund (July 2021 to June 2022), an initiative funded by the Australian Government.
