NSW Health rethinks systems approach with vaccine platform

NSW Health had to rethink its approach to developing and deploying the system when it rolled out the Service Now-based vaccination management platform, which is now used to manage the administration of more than 1.7 million vaccine doses.

CIO Zoran Bolevich told ServiceNow’s Now@Work event that the relatively new platform had highlighted the importance of “CX, usability and agility” for an agency not accustomed to consumer-facing systems.

NSW Health has been rolling out the system from June 2020, an in-house solution developed with the help of Microsoft, DGL and Whispir, over 21 business days in early 2021.

CoVax, which went live in the South West Sydney local health district in February, was aimed at supporting the vaccination of nearly 150,000 frontline health workers as well as those who are chronically ill.

But while the system worked “very well” for a few months with a limited scope of work, Bolevich said it became clear CoVax would need to take on a greater workload.

“It became very clear that NSW Health was going to play a huge role in the national immunization programme, and that the scope [would need] To include the entire population of NSW,” he said.

“So to deal with that increased scale, we had to consider implementing a new platform that was going to be well suited to that task.”

At the same time, with eligibility criteria continuing to change to suit the supply of vaccines, Bolevich said the platform needed to be “not only scalable but also very configurable and flexible”.

The Vaccine Administration Management (VAM) platform that ended with NSW Health is an end-to-end system that Victoria offered with its Microsoft-based platform.

“It’s not just a booking system, as important as those bookings, but it’s really an end-to-end vaccination administration management solution,” Bolevich said.

He said it has a clinical management component, a diagnostic module for the actual administration of the vaccine and functionality to report administered doses in the Australian Immunization Register.

The platform has facilitated around 1.7 million appointment bookings and 1.2 million doses till date.

VAM up and running in 10 days

Bolevich said existing knowledge of eHealth NSW and understanding of ServiceNow’s platform gave the “confidence” to consider EAM as the state’s vaccination management solution.

“We already have a great platform team in eHealth NSW, which was able to partner with a very capable team at ServiceNow,” he said.

“They brought their technology expertise as well as their development skills to the project and an understanding of how to best implement them in our environment.”

Bolevich also said that by working together, the eHealth NSW and ServiceNow teams were able to be “super agile” and roll out the system to the first clinic in just 10 business days in June.

“It’s a great time of delivery, which then continues with the daily releases of VAM, so the team continues to grow.” [and] The product is changing incredibly fast,” he said.

The update has also been accompanied by a “complex data migration”, with teams working with NSW Health-run vaccination centers to progressively migrate existing bookings to VAM.

User training and ensuring “flow is optimal in all these clinics” – some of which do only a few hundred vaccinations a day, while others do up to 20,000 – are also ongoing, he said.

cx learning curve

Bolevich said VAM has been a “big learning” curve for NSW Health, as “consumer-facing or public-facing systems … are very different propositions from the systems we have traditionally developed and deployed.” been doing”.

“Most of our previous experience has been in designing and deploying really great diagnostic systems or business systems that are primarily used by physicians and other staff… within our organization, hence the digitization of the inside Doing [NSW] health,” he said.

“Now with a system like VAM, the main users of the system are really the general public, so we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people interacting with these systems on a daily basis.

“And it requires a very different approach, a very different way of thinking and a very different way of developing and deploying systems.

“So in addition to scale, which is clear, where it becomes really important, is to be able to continuously improve, enhance the customer experience, usability and agility [and] Listen to customer feedback. “

further afield

ServiceNow is also being used for a number of other consumer-facing programs such as collecting measurements of the patient’s experience of care and outcomes of care as part of NSW Health’s patient-reported measures program.

“We’re using structured survey tools to capture that information and we’re using the Now platform as the workflow engine,” Bolevich said, adding that the data is used to adjust treatment plans.

The Now platform is also being used similarly in the area of ​​specialist outpatient services to digitize the referral process.

“Generally in Australia, patients will see their GP, who will then refer a patient to a specialist,” he said.

“These processes are still somewhat paper-based, and we are trying to digitize them and convert these referrals into an electronic workflow and manage it in a safer, faster, more effective way.”