Health New Zealand standardizes on single-tenant Teams Rooms

Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora (HNZ), the organization responsible for managing and improving health across New Zealand, comprises what used to be 29 separate district health boards. As part of a broad effort to unify the nation’s health systems, one of the first areas that HNZ wanted to tackle was meeting rooms. Since each district had selected different vendors and different technologies, there was inequity in collaboration experiences across the country’s four regions. “We wanted to come up with a standardized approach where we could reduce the variation in meeting rooms by building a single experience around Microsoft Teams Rooms,” said Seamus Barden, Project Manager at HNZ. “We came up with a small room, a medium room, and a large room template that would set up all rooms within a central tenant from day one.”

HNZ issued a request for proposal (RFP) for 265 meeting rooms and selected Connect NZ and Spark as its two strategic partners to deliver a complete turnkey solution, with both partners supplying Yealink, Sony, and Samsung as the preferred communications hardware. “We were impressed with the expertise and nationwide reach that both partners provided, so decided to move forward with two providers,” said Dan Coe, Group Manager Digital Workplace at HNZ. “The four-way collaboration between ourselves, Spark, Connect NZ, and Microsoft was an asset for us, helping accelerate deployments and drive issue resolution faster.”

While standardized room templates provided the foundational design framework, site-specific architectural constraints necessitated bespoke modifications for each deployment location. The large room specification, for instance, comprised a centralized touch-control interface, dual 75-inch displays, an AI-enabled PTZ camera with intelligent tracking, ceiling microphone arrays, DSP-enabled speakers, and Microsoft Teams Rooms compute. "The baseline template achieved an 80 percent deployment success rate across large-room configurations," noted Peter Burgess, Business Development Manager at Connect NZ. "However, acoustic analysis and room geometry assessments required scalable adjustments, expanding microphone coverage from two to four units or speaker distribution from four to eight zones to maintain optimal audio intelligibility and coverage."

Additional challenges came with older buildings. “Public healthcare environments can be really challenging in that no two physical rooms are alike,” said Kristian Cook, Health Sales Director at Spark Health New Zealand. “Asbestos is often present in older buildings, for example. The team came up with solutions for mounting gear without cutting into walls or ceilings to maintain environmental safety.”

HNZ staff has had an overwhelmingly positive response to the new meeting rooms, particularly around the ease-of-use of the new solutions. “At Manawatu Hospital in the mid-central region where Connect NZ has deployed 40 rooms so far, the feedback has been fantastic,” said Burgess. “We’re being told, ‘Everyone can walk into the room and know how to make a call—it all looks and works the same.’ It’s this reliability and consistency that is really making a difference.”

Success with initial room deployments allowed the HNZ team to secure additional funding and increase the project scope to 400 total rooms—with plans to continue to expand that number in the future. “We’ve got 88,000 staff, so we see this project as a foundational step in terms of having a unified, full Teams experience and being able to connect as a nationally enabled organization,” said Coe. “It’s a critical part of how everyone needs to communicate and collaborate.”

Extending meeting room capabilities to meet clinical needs

Collaboration capabilities are of particular benefit to remote locations like the Chatham Islands, located about 800 km east of New Zealand’s South Island and home to approximately 600 residents. Two Teams Rooms were implemented for the small hospital serving these residents, one of which was in the emergency department. HNZ and Spark adjusted the design for this room to include a second camera on the ceiling over the patient’s bed area. This allows clinicians to switch between cameras or stream simultaneously to get additional clinical input from staff in Christchurch. “Extending these solutions for clinical use can drive significant and broad impact for patient care,” said Cook.

HNZ is already working on plans to build out more complex clinical rooms, with an initial focus on radiology and oncology. “We’re about to do a proof of concept that will allow remote locations to connect with specialists across New Zealand and share knowledge for better patient outcomes without having to put a specialist on a plane,” said Barden. “We will be working with clinician-led teams to design these spaces, including theaters and training rooms.”

AI expands converged communications value

Another way that HNZ is expanding the impact of its unified meeting rooms solution is by activating AI-powered features like Copilot Facilitator. “We are grateful that we choose the Teams platform, because now we have the added bonus of turning on Copilot Facilitator. The experience when you use AI within the meeting is so much more powerful for collaboration than what the platform offered even just six months ago,” said Coe.

Both Connect NZ and Spark are seeing growing demand for generative-AI features from customers like HNZ. “Facilitator utilization is creating efficiencies by providing meeting summarizations and transcriptions,” said Jack Olliver, Sales Director at Connect NZ. Josh Nuske, Senior Consultant at Spark continued: “For healthcare customers, we also see real-time translation as an incredibly valuable feature that Copilot can provide to help bridge the language gaps between patient and clinical staff—or even clinical staff in different regions. This is a key component to making healthcare more accessible.”

“The four-way collaboration between ourselves, Spark, Connect NZ, and Microsoft was an asset for us, helping accelerate deployments and drive issue resolution faster.”

— Dan Coe, Group Manager Digital Workplace, HNZ

“We’ve got 88,000 staff, so we see this project as a foundational step in terms of having a unified, full Teams experience and being able to connect as a nationally enabled organization.”

— Dan Coe, Group Manager Digital Workplace, HNZ

HNZ taps Spark and Connect NZ to unify meeting room experiences nationwide