- Digital transformation in healthcare
is driven by a unique interplay
between health policy imperatives and reforms
and great advances in technology.
All health systems around the world
are looking at ways to transform themselves,
to reform themselves.
And most of these reforms seem to be inspired
by the idea of moving towards more of a value based
healthcare proposition.
How can we actually deliver outcomes that matter most
to patients and communities
and how can we activate patients and carers
and make them real participants in the healthcare process?
Digital technology is really seen as a key enabler
of many of those reforms.
eHealth New South Wales is the digital arm
of New South Wales Health, which in turn is the largest
public health system in Australia.
Our mission is to support digital transformation
and digital enablement of our health system.
It looks after 8.2 million residents.
It has 160,000 staff working across 228 public hospitals
in more than 300 community health centres.
Digital transformation is already making a big difference
to patient outcomes in New South Wales Health.
- Some of our early transformation work
has been taking our critical clinical
and corporate applications
and then migrating them up into the cloud.
This allows us to take advantage of the cloud hosted
technology to better support the healthcare
of New South Wales citizens.
We've taken eight of our largest clinical applications
and we have migrated them up into the AWS cloud space.
For six of those applications,
we've had the privilege of partnering
with our application vendors to be the first organisation
nationally or globally to rehost them into the cloud.
- These types of systems are particularly focusing
on supporting day-to-day clinical care
and making it safer, making more efficient
and also introducing various types of decision support tools
that are assisting our busy clinicians
with their day to day work.
- The approach we took is to actually not just do a lift
and shift, but actually refactor most of our applications
as we've migrated to the cloud.
As a result of that, we've optimised most of the use
of our applications to use some of the native offerings
and managed services that are available
in the cloud offering.
We've actually delivered a lot of improvements
to our services, to the uptime of our products
and platforms, and also the agility
in the way we deliver those services and added extra tools
and services on top of those platforms.
Anecdotally, we've had about 60% uptime improvement
in some of the platforms have been moved up
into the cloud infrastructure
as part of the re-platforming.
We've also increased the sustainability
in terms of the financial sustainability
by being able to use cloud infrastructure to spin up
and spin down servers when they're not being used.
The advantage of that for both clinical
and non-clinical staff means that our applications
are available more of the time
which means less outages to clinical care.
They're more responsive, they scale easier.
- eHealth New South Wales is also making
strategic investments, covering things
like refreshing all of our infrastructure
and our core systems in our data centres to public cloud.
It's investing in our people by uplifting skills
and investing in innovations,
like advanced analytics to benefit patient care.
- We recognised early on that a technical change
with the migration to cloud is only one piece of the puzzle.
In order to continue to innovate
and make the most of the cloud technology
and the benefits that come with the digital transformation,
we needed to upskill our staff to take advantage of that.
The first way we do this is by encouraging our staff
to go through the Digital Academy.
The Digital Academy offers training pathways
that allow our staff to get baseline competencies
in things like cloud technology, DevOps,
continuous improvement, continuous development,
all these type of skills that are going to be important
as we go through the digital transformation.
- The reason we've been able to move at pace to be agile
is because we have already had really strong
technology foundations in place
and we also had really, really strong effective partnerships
with our industry partners and suppliers
who have enabled us through technologies
like Cloud to be able to very quickly respond
to increasing demands for the use of digital technology.
- And the team at AWS feel really privileged
to be one of eHealth strategic partners
in this transformation journey that they're going through.
They are a unique global leader
in the healthcare provider space
in all the ambitious work that they're doing
across the org transformation,
the technology transformation,
as well as their investment in skills,
they're making absolute global leading strides
to deliver modern healthcare
to the citizens of New South Wales.