Idea 11 empowers Hear and Say by designing a machine learning powered business automation solution
About Hear and Say:
Founded by Brisbane Speech Pathologist Dr Dimity Dornan AO in 1992, Hear and Say is a world-leading Paediatric Auditory-Verbal and cochlear implant centre.
They provide early intervention services to children who are deaf to help them to hear, listen and speak through early diagnosis, advanced hearing technology and world-leading auditory verbal therapy programs.
Overview
Hear and Say is a world-leading Paediatric Auditory-Verbal and cochlear implant centre. They provide early intervention services to children who are deaf to help them to hear, listen and speak through early diagnosis, advanced hearing technology and world-leading auditory verbal therapy programs. Over 16,000 children enroll in their school screening program each year.
In a bid to improve their organisational efficiency and enable Hear and Say to focus on their mission, Hear and Say engaged Idea 11 in early 2020 to develop a cloud-based solution that allowed them to automate the processing of paper-based consent forms.
The Challenge
Hear and Say runs a specialised program called ‘Hear to Learn’, where their mobile team of experts provide hearing and vision screening to schools across Queensland, helping children to optimise their education now and into the future.
As part of the ‘Hear to Learn’ school screening program, each student’s parent or guardian is required to fill a consent form. Cognito Forms have been utilised by Hear and Say to provide a digital version of the consent form, which was adopted by approximately 75% of recipients, while the remaining 25% opted to submit completed paper forms via various channels, equating to over 4,000 paper consent forms each year.
Hear and Say used to rely on volunteers to digitally transcribe the completed paper forms before the consent information could be uploaded to their internal CRM application. This process was extremely time consuming and relied on the availability of volunteers to complete this critical process.
“The experience of working with the Idea 11 team was fantastic. They developed a cloud-based solution to assist us with processing large volume of consent form data for our school screening program.
This solution proved to be a lifesaver when our program was impacted by COVID-19. We were able to recommence our service to schools, while not utilising our volunteers for data entry due to strict restrictions on visitors to our office. The OCR application provided us with a timely solution.”
- Lyndal Douglas,
Administration Assistant, School Screening
The Solution
Idea 11 was engaged to implement a solution along with process improvement suggestions aimed at significantly reducing the manual effort required to capture information provided on paper consent forms. As part of the project, Idea 11 developed a cloud-based solution that allowed Hear and Say employees or volunteers to automate the processing of handwritten completed consent forms and easily extract and validate the completed sections.
An OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application was developed to ‘read’ the scanned completed forms and then export a batch of processed and validated data to an external file, to allow uploading of multiple completed consent forms into the existing CRM application at one time.
The OCR application was developed using a combination of Google Cloud Vision and Amazon Textract to convert information that has been handwritten on these consent forms into a text format compatible with Hear and Say’s internal CRM. These services utilise machine learning algorithms to perform text recognition without requiring specific knowledge of the layout and information contained in the forms beforehand, simplifying development and maintenance of the application.
Once the consent forms have been processed, the user is given the opportunity to compare the output with the provided consent forms and make any manual adjustments, ensuring the data has been correctly read. The digitalised forms can then be submitted in bulk into Hear and Say’s CRM.
“The application has significantly reduced the reliance on human power and errors,” says Lyndal Douglas, Administration Assistant, School Hearing Screening at Hear and Say.
In addition to designing and developing the application for Hear and Say, Idea 11 also provided services to assist Hear and Say with improvements to the form layout and components in order to improve the quality of the OCR processing. Idea 11 also provided training to the Hear and Say team to assist in incorporating the application into Hear and Say’s business.
The Benefits
Automation of the manual data entry process has helped the Hear and Say team to avoid human errors and maintain data integrity.
Elimination of manual tasks from a repetitive and recurring process, resulting in substantial time savings, thus helping the Hear and Say team to have a renewed focus on their core mission of delivering highest standard of clinical care to people in need.
About Idea 11:
Idea 11 is an award-winning, full-stack AWS IT company that specialises in digital transformations, cloud infrastructure, software development and managed services.
We're recognised for our fresh approach to being a technology partner. We help our customers solve the challenges of today, envision their future and make it real. Our strong values, personal client relationships and long-term thinking makes us unique.
