Integration Services

Canning Division of General Practice
Working Systems Professional Services Division worked with the Canning Division of General Practice to deliver patient consultation summaries between the After-Hours Clinic located at the Armadale Hospital and general practitioners around Perth’s south-east suburbs.

The usual practice is that a consultation summary is mailed or faxed from the After-Hours Clinic to the patient’s GP's. This can commonly cause delays in the delivery of important clinical information. There are also added problems of poor legibility, extra administration for staff and poor security during transmission.

The new system helps to minimise these problems and enhances the quality of patient care, as GP's now have immediate and secure access to information about their patient’s After Hours visit.

“Data is extracted from the clinical electronic records at the After Hours Clinic, bundled using XML and encrypted” explains Manager of the Information Technology Department at Canning Division, Mr. John Newman.

“When received at the GP's practice the data is decrypted, unbundled from XML and can then be saved and printed as a letter, saved as a letter in the Medical Director patient file and/or saved as patient data in the patient file. The system enables the GP's to have complete control over how they use the information they are sent“.

Armadale After Hours Clinic Director and General Practitioner, Dr Stuart Burton says, “The ability of this system to deliver timely patient information is superb. With just a few key strokes, the GP knows instantly if their patient has attended the After Hours service, without wading through numerous reports and letters”.

“Details of diagnosis, treatment, prescribed medications and the treating doctor are immediately available for discussion with the patient. The service also has cost benefits but the implications for improved patient care are far more significant”.

Dr Burton adds “The system should be expanded to all hospital outpatient and Emergency Departments so that timely information is available in General Practice. This is technology working for the doctor; a help not a hindrance”.

At the heart of the service is Working Systems information broker e-switch, which manages the information exchange between the After Hours Clinic and GP's within the Canning Division. e-switch uses the Health Insurance Commission’s PKI encryption technology to avoid the security risks associated with using the Internet. Patient details and privacy are protected from unauthorised intrusion.

As healthcare is delivered locally, then by connecting GP's through e-switch™ and giving them quick, reliable and secure access to each other and to the administrative tools they need, we are helping individual GP's reclaim more time to focus on the patient. The result is better access to relevant community healthcare information, and drastic reductions in everyday healthcare transaction costs.

Another recent project at the Canning Division was the development and implementation of a Diabetes Referral System (also based e-switch™), which provides an integrated view of diabetes consultations within the Division.

Woodside Australian Energy

Another example of the Professional Services Division's very strong technical capabilities was the major deployment of our integration broker product e-switch™ into the SAP market via an e-procurement project at Woodside Australian Energy Ltd.

The project was initiated in late 2001 by Woodside’s Shared Services Division to innovate service delivery for both its internal customers and Woodside’s external suppliers. The e-switch™ integration broker was identified as being the preferred tool for development of an Extranet featuring integration of procurement workflows.

The e-procurement Extranet allows suppliers to directly request payments over the Web, automatically triggering a series of events including approval dispatch, reminders, escalation handling, data conversion and delivery to SAP. Process cycle-times can also be monitored at all times for performance reviews and process improvement.

The Workflow and Data Transformation capabilities of e-switch™ were key factors in the choice, with process improvements seen as the key to the value proposition. The project incorporates traditional middleware functions such as message transformation and secure delivery.

The flexible workflow-scripting capability of e-switch™ integrates the data within the SAP ERP environment, a customised Extranet and e-mail.

Woodside’s Shared Services team leader, David Tweddle believes the procurement project was a great value proposition:

“Aside from the internal productivity gains to Woodside, the project improves the cash cycle of our suppliers and involves them more tightly in our internal processes. Just as important was the ability to implement process improvements which reflect best practice in our procurement environment in small bites, while retaining our investment in Enterprise Resource Planning software. With the e-switch™ approach we were able to deliver tangible value, with very competitive costs and timelines”.

In September 2002, the e-procurement trial at Woodside Australian Energy was given the go ahead for production release. The e-procurement Extranet that uses e-switch™ to integrate data and process flows between Web, e-mail and ERP applications has met business and technical objectives and is now being progressively rolled out to external suppliers and internal users.

Currently, a total of around 70 external suppliers are using the Extranet, and a total of $70 million dollars of payments have been approved through the system during the 12 months up to the end of November 2003. These statistics prove the value of this e-procurement system for Woodside.