TechnologyOne Just What Doctor Ordered, Says National Health Funding Body
Australia’s NHFB Praises Service and Consulting for SaaS Project
BRISBANE, 14 November 2019—The organisation responsible for administering Australia’s $50BN in public hospital funding, the National Health Funding Body (NHFB), has completed a major step in its digital transformation with help from TechnologyOne, Australia’s leading enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company.
The NHFB is an independent statutory authority. Its role is to administer funding to the country’s 143 Local Hospital Networks (LHN), including advising the Treasurer on the Commonwealth Government’s contribution, monitoring payments from State and Territory governments and reporting on the overall public hospital funding pool.
Although it was only established in 2011, the NHFB’s information technology infrastructure, which had been built in a relatively short time, was primarily on-premise and involved a significant number of manual processes, says Chief Executive Officer, Shannon White.
“We already had one cloud-based tool, so we understood the benefits of SaaS. When we looked at the offerings from the leading vendors we saw significant advantages in the TechnologyOne product. It was more suited to our needs ‘out of the box’ and involved significantly less time and cost to implement,” Mr White says.
The NHFB now has a payment system which offers the security and functionality it wanted; better reporting tools, collaboration, fewer manual processes and more digital workflows—important for an agency dealing with billions of dollars in transactions—as well as better integration with other Federal government bodies.
But it was TechnologyOne’s service that has the customer singing its praises.
“The thing about TechnologyOne was their attitude. The approach was always ‘we’re one team’. Whenever we hit challenges, everyone just got the job done,” says Mr White.
The project began with TechnologyOne’s consulting team working closely with the NHFB’s project team to translate its business requirements into deliverables for the new SaaS -based system. That process highlighted another benefit of the solution.
“The TechnologyOne solution was very configurable. Often with large enterprise technology systems you get what you get and there is not a lot of flexibility. The consulting team from TechnologyOne did a great job of understanding our needs and adjusting the solution to fit,” Mr White says.
“As an example, the team worked closely with us, as well as people from several Federal Government departments and the Reserve Bank, to accommodate our specific needs around encryption and authentication and build it into the solution,” Mr White says.
The NHFB’s new payment system went live on October 1 and has already delivered more than $5.2 billon in funding payments to public hospitals around the country. That’s a mere eight weeks from the formal start of the project, a result Mr White attributes to hard work from the whole project team and a good project plan.
“The project team included different external groups plus our own people and needed to co-ordinate with a large number of different agencies across Federal, State and Territory governments. The lesson learned there was that having a central project timeline everyone could work to kept us on track,” Mr White says.
The NHFB now has a five-year agreement with TechnologyOne and is keen to work with the company on further projects. Mr White says its new SaaS-based payment system is step one on the organisation’s digital transformation, with plans ahead for deeper cloud integration with its Federal government peers.
About TechnologyOne
TechnologyOne (ASX:TNE) is Australia’s largest enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS) company and one of Australia’s top 200 ASX-listed companies, with offices across six countries. Our enterprise SaaS solution transforms business and makes life simple for our customers by providing powerful, deeply integrated enterprise software that is incredibly easy to use. Over 1,200 leading corporations, government departments and statutory authorities are powered by our software.
Our global SaaS solution provides deep functionality for the markets we serve: local government, government, education, health and community services, asset intensive industries and financial services. For these markets we invest significant funds each year in R&D. We also take complete responsibility to market, sell, implement, support and run our solutions for our customers, which reduces time, cost and risk.
For over 30 years, we have been providing our customers with enterprise software that evolves and adapts to new and emerging technologies, allowing our customers to focus on their business and not technology.
