2018-19 Financial Year in Review
In 2018-19, HSS achieved a number of significant outcomes that helped us to deliver simple, reliable and responsive services to our customers.
Online payslips
In 2018-19, HSS successfully launched a new online payslip portal to enable staff working at the East Metropolitan Health Service (EMHS) to easily and securely access their current and historic payslips. In response to customers wanting access to an online solution instead of printed hardcopy payslips, our ICT, Workforce and Organisational Development and Transformation teams worked together to develop a solution. The portal is now being implemented across the remainder of the WA health system.
Improving medical payroll
HSS introduced a new two-way SMS solution to reduce unnecessary delays and errors in processing termination payments for ‘Doctors in Training’ across the WA health system. This new system allows doctors whose contracts are coming to an end to quickly and easily confirm if they will remain employed by or be leaving the WA public health system. The solution enables HSS to accurately calculate and pay leave entitlements to ‘Doctors in Training’ by the next pay day, and reduces the time taken to process termination payments.
Improving procurement and supply practices
In 2018-19, HSS enhanced its analysis and modelling capabilities to gain in-depth understanding of the value of spend as well as contract and purchasing practices to inform the prioritisation of future procurement projects. This included the establishment of system-wide self-service dashboards providing customers a range of procurement related insights including supplier performance, spend analysis, purchasing and contract expiry.
Other procurement and supply highlights in 2018-19 included:
- Procurement and contract management of whole-of-health contracts yielding $11 million (annualised) in price reductions.
- The completion of a review into high-use essential items and clinical products located at hospitals (Imprest) and stocked at the HSS State Distribution Centre, resulting in a saving of more than $1 million for the WA health system.
- Communication of the WA Health Supplier Code of Conduct to more than 8,500 active suppliers.
Providing a single patient information system
In October 2018, HSS completed the roll-out of a single patient administration system, WebPAS, across the state. WebPAS enables WA public hospitals and health services to access a single source of truth for all patient activity.
Every public patient in Western Australia will now have a unique patient identifier regardless of where they receive care in WA’s public health system, and information associated with their healthcare history will be available through linked clinical applications.
Having one patient admission systems enables health professionals and administrators to improve the management of patient flow and information, which will enhance the patient’s healthcare journey between hospitals and ensure safer care.
My Health Record integration
HSS successfully configured six core clinical applications to enable clinicians across the WA health system to access the Australian My Health Record (MHR) system – a personally-controlled online summary of a consumer’s health information.
Through this integration, patient discharge summaries, pathology and medical imaging reports are now automatically uploaded to the MHR system. More than one million patient records have been uploaded and My Health Records are already accessed by clinicians more than 2,500 times a week. WA was the first jurisdiction to achieve this result on time and on budget.
Further Commonwealth funding has been awarded to the WA health system in 2019-20 to lead a range of My Health Record related projects and HSS looks forward to working with our colleagues across the country on this initiative.
Award-winning nursing partnership
HSS’ temporary nursing agency, NurseWest, was recognised in the Australian Awards for University Teaching for a partnership initiative that offers registered nursing students real-world healthcare experience.
The collaboration between Edith Cowan University, North Metropolitan TAFE, Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital and NurseWest provides opportunities for students to undertake employment as an Assistant-In-Nursing while completing their registered nursing studies. The program has proved beneficial for both the students and the WA health system.
Major ICT infrastructure reform
Leading the general ICT reform, HealthNext, was an operational priority for HSS in 2018-19. This program will transform the WA health system’s ICT infrastructure to become a scalable, cost-effective hybrid-cloud environment and will enable HSS to respond to innovation and support a more patient-centric health system. The program aligns with the State Government’s ICT Strategy to reduce ICT infrastructure duplication and costs, improve communication and maximise value.
HealthNext’s new community cloud and internet gateway services are now operational. Work will progress with our customers over the next two years to safely migrate more than 2,000 clinical and corporate applications to the new environment and upgrade the existing Wide Area Network (WAN) connecting all WA health system sites.