How Western Health tackled digital innovation at speed

Western Health (WH) manages manages four acute public hospitals and a host of other health facilities in Victoria. It provides a comprehensive integrated range of clinical services, ranging from acute tertiary services in areas of emergency medicine, intensive care, medical and surgical services, through to subacute care and onsite and virtual ambulatory clinics.

When the organisation’s digital transformation plans escalated thanks to the pandemic, WH needed to pivot quickly to ensure remote availability of its systems. This included its Active Directory, which manages identity authentication and authorisation of all network and IT resources users.

When WH requested assistance in moving from an Active Directory it shared with two other major hospitals to one of its own, it was already one of the fastest growing healthcare providers in Australia, having onboarded 3000 new staff over a 12-month period. The organisation was about to embark on a significant amalgamation project and the old Active Directory was a major impediment to a smooth transition.

With the onset the pandemic — and, in particular, its impact on the state of Victoria — WH became an epicentre of action and priorities naturally shifted. Within a 48-hour period, the healthcare provider shifted some of its working model to remote and redirected resources to establish a vaccination hub, which saw 1.4 million doses provided to the community. At one point, WH also took over management of nursing homes in its district, something it hadn’t done before.

Faced with such rapid change, WH relied on Logicalis Australia to complete the now highly complex Active Directory rebuild project and navigate additional new and unforeseen challenges that the pandemic presented. The focus was to avoid unnecessary changes for staff, who were navigating the provision of quality health care to patients in a new remote-based setting.

Cameron McBride, Director of Digital Technology Services at Western Health, said the perfect storm of events was putting real pressure on the staff. 

“With everything going on, we also experienced supply chain issues due to the semiconductor crisis, and were feeling the impacts of the significant pressure placed on our staff,” he said.

“Logicalis was able to alleviate the pressure due to their strong healthcare expertise and understanding what is required to run a 24-hour emergency service. They were also able to architect the work around our amalgamation. The team at Logicalis was accommodating, and never took a rigid view when a challenge was presented.”

Sam Psathas, Health Care Sector Lead at Logicalis Australia, said the Active Directory rebuild has delivered more than modernisation.

“One of the most exciting results of the Active Directory rebuild is that it is an enabler for modernising the business further, particularly around the digital workplace,” Psathas said.

"Importantly, Western Health has a significantly improved security posture, and its identity system for onboarding and offboarding staff can now be practically instantaneous. It is an infinitely better end-user experience with a single sign-on and one identity for all internal systems — instead of having to remember around 15 separate user IDs and passwords previously.”

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