Applying a holistic approach to streamline the administrative, clinician and client experience.

BreastScreen SA (BSSA) provides more than 90,000 free screening mammograms (breast X-rays) each year to South Australian women.

Navigating this flow of clients is no easy feat for any organisation. For BSSA, client information, appointments, resource scheduling, internal quality assurance, workflows and the delivery of mammography results were being managed by a Client Information System (CIS) known as ‘BRAIN’. However this solution did not respond to modern business process requirements, and was plagued by a legacy technology platform, workarounds and inefficient internal workflows resulting in a poor administrative, clinician and client experience.

Recognising that their current IT landscape was holding them back, BSSA knew they needed a transformative change on a limited budget.

To overcome this operational complexity and risk, Program Director for BSSA and Project sponsor Niamh Wade engaged the help of Dialog (formerly operating as Innodev) to deliver results.

Whilst working with the BreastScreen SA and Digital Health SA team to define the scope, it was clear an Enterprise Architecture approach was the best course of action.

The Solution

Dialog delivered results by leveraging an Enterprise Architecture approach, firstly by starting with a review of the business strategy, a strategic planning exercise, business capability modelling and ultimately delivered an IT roadmap covering the entire organisation. As ‘BRAIN’ was the core solution impacting strategic opportunities and staff/clients, the key focus was then on how to bring this important solution up to the needs of the business today and into the future. This included considering strategic options (such as replace with Commercial off the shelf (COTS)) and technology options (if they were to retain).

The review, led by Sean Provis, one of Dialog’s Enterprise Architects, was developed with key stakeholders such as BSSA service clinical & IT staff, Digital Health Strategy & Architecture and Digital Health Application Services.

“Working with Sean and the team was a breath of fresh air. Sean was immediately across the strategy and was clear at the start that stakeholder engagement was fundamental, making sure people were heard.” recalls Niamh. “With his blue sky thinking, he engaged other breast screen services to see what they were doing, what worked and what didn’t, taking a really holistic view before giving us a suite of options we could pick from for a solution.” Niamh said.

BSSA were then able to agree the following strategic outcomes:

• Increased Digital client engagement, including capability uplift for digital services and online bookings thus reducing the call centre volumes
• General Practice (GP) messaging and knowledge sharing across the Health ecosystem, sending results digitally and reducing postage fees
• Enabling the refresh of the core CIS/BRAIN solution iteratively and with a new user experience to improve internal staff and client processes
• Communicating client information and results across the SA Health and Australian Government ecosystem including providing access to results via MyHealthRecord

Dialog also worked with Niamh and key stakeholders using a Human Centred Design (HCD) approach to understand the current Customer Journey and personas. This involved interviewing clients (customers) who have interacted with the BreastScreen SA service, both in metro and rural locations and understanding the key pain points and moments that matter to them. Through this approach, it solidified the strategic planning outcomes and artefacts produced through the EA review.

With the EA review, coupled with the HCD deliverables, Dialog was able to work with BreastScreen SA to submit a business case for the transformative change in under 6 weeks, fortified by the rolling support from all project stakeholders with a shared understanding of what needed to happen and why.

Being able to move this project from an idea to implementation/delivery in 6 months is exceptionally fast in a government/health environment. Niamh credits this to Dialog’s previous experience in health understanding funding constraints and familiarity around political limitations coupled with Sean’s proactivity and approach to going above and beyond for stakeholder engagement from tech level to program managers and Executive level.

“The broad nature of Sean’s skills that point of differentiation. He engaged on a range of levels with a great strategic foresight. His ability to operate at the granular level and the High level showed he had a clear understanding of the operational gap and a strong belief in his work and what it will do to benefit clients and the organisation.” said Niamh.

The Outcome Benefits

Once the IT roadmap/initiatives are delivered, SA women will have:

1. Digital capability to register, book and reschedule their BreastScreen appointments whilst being able to manage their contact details and view their notifications including invitations, reminders and view results via BSSA’s website and MyHealthRecord.
2. Simplified and streamlined client experience for their important screening process, typically every 24 months

GPs/Clinicians will be able access clinical information, in a timely fashion, through their existing medical software

We look forward to sharing a further update in the near future as the initiatives continue.