Customer Scenario
ForHealth supports over a thousand independent professionals to provide quality, accessible healthcare to all Australians. Its goal is to ensure better health outcomes for its 7 million patient visits per year.
They believe that every Australian has a right to high-quality healthcare, wherever they are and regardless of their financial situation.
ForHealth was established as a standalone business following the sale to a private equity company and was facing a need to migrate to its own secure, modern workplace environment.
As a result of the sale, the IT operations had to be created from the existing organisation and established as a standalone entity.
They needed a partner to establish their IT infrastructure and to implement the resources to support their national network of 80 medical and dental centres and user base of over 3000 frontline workers.
Navigating this transition necessitated such a partner to move at speed whilst carefully planning for both commercial and user needs to ensure a seamless migration.
Arinco's Approach and Solution
Arinco stood out to the ForHealth IT team and CIO for its significant experience, nimbleness, and value for money.
Arinco encouraged ForHealth to dedicate IT resources to business-growing capabilities while acting alongside as an effective partner, constantly refining and working on solutions in real-time.
With an iterative process, Arinco helped ForHealth understand the current environment across Active Directory/Azure Active Device Management (MEMCM/SCCM), Office 365 and Security.
The team initially ran collaborative discovery sessions, including workshops, reviews, and data collation, before migrating ForHealth’s 3000 users to a new Active Directory and their Mailboxes to Microsoft 365. The system met expanding requirements for user experience and application capabilities across multiple platforms, devices, and technologies.
Mark Buckley, CIO, ForHealth stated, “I’m most impressed with the multi-skilled individuals at Arinco. They’re multi-domain specialists, allowing them to provide comprehensive assistance and insights across domains.”
Important components of the solution included:
- Stabilisation: Early stabilisation activities to provide short-term relief to existing pain points
- Separation: Migration of ForHealth users from the current Active Directory, Mailboxes and Device Management environment to the new greenfield
- Modernisation: Design and implementation of a modern device management solution utilising Microsoft Endpoint Manager/Intune, Windows 10, Autopilot and Defender for Endpoint. These upgrades provide enhanced device management, security, and productivity features that will align with the evolving needs of ForHealth’s modern IT environment
The improvements led to a significant uplift in the user experience and response capabilities. Critically, the solution was able to handle a large number of users and meet the emerging IT needs of ForHealth, so that users could focus on higher-value activities to grow the business.
Customer Outcomes and Benefits
The final project was delivered on time, on budget and successfully.
While the partnership is ongoing, ForHealth’s tech team is already more agile and focusing on higher-value business enablement activities.
The following Service Management uplifts have been enabled as a result of the successful migration project:
- A more responsive and effective Service desk through automated account and license activation – utilising Azure Active Directory (AAD) and M365 accounts
- Repeatable service requests and automation of fulfilment
- Nimbler operations in customer service, with technology in place to better support new lines of business and the expansion of medical centres
- Increased security positioning
- New digital capabilities
Internal capability improvements have been significantly improved:
- ForHealth has reduced the time it takes to set up new devices in metropolitan areas for medical staff from 4-5 weeks to under 48 hours – from request to set up. This huge reduction in time has refreshed the workplace environment and affected billing points for revenue growth
- A much more reliable and resilient environment for GPs, Dentistry and Corporate users
With the new environment freeing up internal resources, Arinco’s work has helped ForHealth invest more time and energy in automation to reduce the time and effort on activities such as desktop provisioning.
Security improvements have increased by over 30%:
- ForHealth’s Microsoft Secure Score for devices was uplifted from below 50% to over 85% and increasing. This was achieved by adopting Security Baselines and systematic risk and threat management
- Securing the End Points at the frontline will help ForHealth meet its compliance obligations whilst protecting its sensitive patient data
“From an internal technology perspective, what it’s allowed us to do is to pivot these resources into higher-value activities to drive more automation and, in turn, build new digital capabilities, ” said Mark Buckley
The project has also seen significant cost savings at ForHealth:
- Reduced licensing costs by 20-25% thanks to system improvements and appropriate allocation/reclamation of licenses during onboarding and offboarding
- Improved ability to serve customers in a timely manner with a quality outcome
Notably, from the customer point-of-view, GPs and front-line workers have reported higher satisfaction throughout the IT experience. All of this allows medical and dental staff to dedicate more time to patients across its 70-80 sites, with a smaller team, delivering better outcomes and care.
Mark Buckley also added, “Arinco’s a collection of people, really good quality people that can engage in my environment and work with me how I want to work in terms of honest, open communication, talking quite frankly about things and working through solutions in a way that’s pragmatic.”
For more on Arinco’s Modern Work services, visit here.
