Partnered Health

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Partnered Health

When Partnered health acquired healthscope two sets of systems, applications and databases had to streamlined into one.

The summary

Industry:

Health & Wellness

Country:

Australia

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Business Challenge:

After acquiring Healthscope’s medical centre operations, Partnered Health needed to quickly integrate the business’s systems, applications, and processes with its own, in order to optimise business processes across the organisation.

Solution:

Clade – a Brennan company helped Partnered Health to implement a streamlined, integrated accounts payable system for the newly merged organisation. Clade next enabled Partnered Health to access improved financial reporting, using Microsoft Power BI, to show KPIs through easy-to-use dashboards and data visualisations.

Results:

With Clade, Partnered Health were able to integrate finance systems within a short timeframe, despite continually moving goal posts. And with Power BI’s business intelligence capabilities now rolled out across states, Sate Managers can now quickly and easily compare efficiencies and performance across sites.

A successful acquisition

In August 2017, Partnered Health acquired Healthscope’s medical centre operations – a network of 43 medical centres, four specialist skin clinics and one specialist breast diagnostic clinic. Singapore-based Partnered Health owns and operates an extensive network of healthcare facilities across eight countries in the Asia Pacific region and is now the third largest primary care business in Australia.

As with most mergers and acquisitions, each company had its own systems, applications and databases. These needed to be integrated as quickly as possible to streamline and optimise business processes across the organisation. Marcus Jasper, who had worked with Healthscope for 10 years, was invited to take on the challenge as the new National IT Manager, Medical Centres at Partnered Health.

“It turned out to be the biggest six months of my professional life,” he says.

I’ve found everyone at Clade really easy to work with, even under pressure. I learned very quickly that I could trust them to do what they promised and often quite a bit more.

Marcus Jasper, National IT Manager, Medical Centres

An integrated accounts payable system

Doctors within corporatised systems such as Partnered Health and Healthscope are independent contractors – they’re paid according to the work they do. Healthscope had developed its own billings/accounts payable system for doctors’ payments known as DocPays to collect all of the billing information from its medical centres to calculate the amount that each doctor needed to be paid.

“The initial stage of the project was to import all of that into Partnered’s finance system,” says Jasper. “Our first priority was generating the bank files that would put the right money into all of the doctors’ accounts.”

To complicate matters, Partnered Health had recently installed a new NetSuite finance system in its Singapore head office with the intention of rolling it out internationally. Given the work in progress, Australia needed to be first.

“Clade were already doing work for Partnered and, as they were very happy with them, it made sense for me to ask for their help on this project,” says Jasper. “We got together, sketched everything out on a white board and talked through what was needed. By the end of the meeting I felt confident they could do the job.”

A tight deadline

A team from Singapore flew in to help with the switch to NetSuite.
“As this was their first migration they had no experience of possible pitfalls or things to look out for,” says Jasper. “They stayed for a week and Clade came to all of the meetings so we were working it all out together.”

Healthscope had given the team just six months to have the accounts payable system running independently.

“That took us to March 2018,” says Jasper. “The problem was, by the time I’d been given the go-ahead and Clade had come on board, it was already the second week of October. We couldn’t get started on the real work until the middle of January so I asked for a month’s extension – but Clade powered through the job and, in the end, we didn’t need the extra time.”

Producing financial reports

Clade then moved on to the second stage of the project – financial reportin

“State managers had no visibility of how their businesses were tracking so, once the accounts payable was taken care of, Clade began creating dashboards using Microsoft PowerBI to show key performance indicators (KPIs),” says Jasper. “That involved a lot of work in integrating with a brand new payroll system, adding more information, making sure the data was accurate and going backwards and forwards between medical centres and state managers.”

This has been completed and is currently being rolled out.
“It’s just about good to go – and it means our state managers will be able to compare efficiencies and performance across all of our different sites,” says Jasper.

A continuing relationship

Within the medical centres, doctors’ generally have the support of a practice manager along with IT, reception and nursing staff. These costs are controlled by practice management software and, again, the software is likely to vary from organisation to organisation. In this case, Healthscope has ZedMed feeding into DocPays while other practices owned by Partnered Health are running BestPractice.

“Clade are making it possible for BestPractice to feed into DocPays,” says Jasper. “Some of the stand-alone medical centres acquired by Partnered are still using manual finance systems, so Clade is also working on bringing those across. Soon we’ll be able to pay all of our doctors through DocPays and integrate all of our systems with NetSuite.”

Jasper expects his relationship with Clade to continue.

“We get along well and I’ve found everyone at Clade really easy to work with, even under pressure,” he says. “We needed to get so much done in such a short timeframe that the goal posts were continually moving. That can be very frustrating, but Clade were prepared to be very flexible and I’m sure they put in a lot more hours than I know about. I learned very quickly that I could trust them to do what they promised and often quite a bit more.”

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