Customer Scenario
For more than 60 years, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has been setting the standards for General Practitioner (GP) education and training; across urban, rural, and remote Australia. Acting as a point of connection, and a voice, they work closely with emerging and established doctors in general practice to provide patient-centred care as well as advocate for better health and wellbeing for all Australians.
Having built a reputation in providing leading support for GPs at every stage of their career, the business has grown to become the largest professional general practice organisation in Australia – serving now over 40,000 members.
With a growing number of GPs in training and a membership who support the community – over 2 million patients each year – the business has gone through a period of rapid growth, with the intention to open new facilities across regional Australia in 2023 – growing three times their current size to deliver the Australian General Practice Training Program (AGPT) nationally.
Alongside this, commencing in 2023, RACGP is bringing its Continuous Professional Development (CPD) program in line with new MBA (Medical Board of Australia) requirements for medical specialist training.
One of the key changes requires GPs to log hours instead of points to meet their PD CPD. As such, RACGP needed to support its members in navigating this change.
They commenced a strategy to uplift and improve its member-facing platform, known as MyCPD – A platform utilised by GPs to search courses and training events and log required activities, contributing towards their new professional development targets.
To complete this endeavour, RACGP was seeking to:
- Standardise its cloud footprint onto Microsoft Azure
- Remove the complexity and additional skillset required to maintain the previous platform, which would allow their team to do more with less – including enabling faster troubleshooting and bug fixing
- Build robust CI/CD pipelines to accelerate deployment and enforce strong governance on our release management and source control, ensuring careful oversight of release management and source control processes
- Reduce the overhead costs associated with legacy technology
Arinco's Approach and Solution
Arinco were introduced to RACGP by Microsoft, given our extensive expertise in API migrations on the Azure stack.
Commencing the project in May 2022, we first completed an Application Modernisation assessment looking at their current environment, partnering with the RACGP team.
“What’s important to us when taking on new technologies is we want to work in a partnership and in an agile team, where we get the knowledge transfer and exposure to subject matter experts to help train and develop our people,” says Richard Dowsett, IT Manager, RACGP.
Arinco migrated RACGP’s MyCPD web application, including all the data, search indexes, APIs and data synchronisation processes – rebuilding the application in Microsoft Azure.
We utilised the following Microsoft services:
- Azure App Service
- Azure Function Apps
- Azure Cognitive Search
- Azure API Management
- Azure Cosmos DB
- Azure Service Bus
- Azure Static Web App
Richard Dowsett added, “What’s worked really well is that Arinco have a good understanding of the technology and complexity of our business, and they’ve blended well with the team, and it’s been quite a pleasure.”
Customer Outcomes and Benefits
This is only one of the first steps in RACGP’s 5-year digital strategy.
Richard Dowsett stated”that the migration so far has been a big step forward in establishing our Azure infrastructure and having that presence in the cloud. It allows the interconnection of events, education, and training – enabling the decommissioning of legacy technical debt, allowing us to consolidate our CPD application onto serverless architecture.”
This engagement has enabled RACGP to:
- Improve efficiency internally – This will help RACGP to build new features, which can be delivered to market quicker – rapidly exceeding the expectations of the business, whilst also removing complexity from RACGP’s code base
- Standardise IT delivery onto one cloud provider – making this modern environment more favourable to attract the right talent
- Optimise costs – RACGP has saved over $100,000 in costs through cloud hosting changes and by decommissioning legacy platforms
“We have focused on our Integration strategy and standards to adopt reusable API pattern, which in turn has had positive impacts on other projects we have got in flight and integrating a whole lot of systems,” stated Richard Dowsett.
The completion of stage one and continued work will allow RACGP to position its CPD practice at the forefront of the industry and aid in its efforts to provide high-quality care to all Australians.
Account Executive David La, Arinco stated, “It has been great partnering with the RACGP team and helping them realise both business and technology outcomes. This is a testament to our team and how they truly listen to what our customers are asking for, help with delivering the outcomes as well, and enabling our customers to run with the solutions.”
Richard Dowsett also added, “This new MyCPD version was released on time and was essentially a re-write, overhauling the UI, functionality improvements and business logic changes to comply with new CPD policies and ensure the offering is commercially competitive. Member feedback is extremely positive. Having an environment that was optimised for our developers’ skillsets was core to achieving this release date.”
For more on Arinco’s Application Innovation services, visit here.
