When the federal government embarked on its prototype GovERP platform in 2019, it would have been wise to take notice of the work of one of the smallest agencies in Canberra.
The National Health Funding Body (NHFB), a clearing house for $68 billion in annual funding for the public hospital system, had just wrapped up a nine-month project for a new payments system.
With a small budget and an SAP-based system no longer fit for purpose, the agency made up of just 30 staff took a chance on a system from Australia’s largest home-grown ERP software provider, TechnologyOne.
Fast-forward almost five years and that system has just hit $300 billion in payments without an outage, while GovERP becomes the latest government tech project to be consigned to the trash heap.
The stark difference between the two projects that started in the same year is not lost on NHFB chief executive Shannon White, who was initially attracted to TechOne for the payment system because of its low $2 million price tag and speed of delivery over SAP.
“It was a quarter of the capital costs, at less than half the time to build, at a quarter of the ongoing operational support costs,” Mr White said, adding that it would have taken less time had the agency not “added three months of co-design”.
The co-design took place with state and territory health departments, reducing friction when the solution did go live, generating goodwill with 143 hospital networks and their 690 public hospitals in the process.
The payment system went live in October 2019, replacing a “clunky” SAP system that was pulled together by the then Department of Human Service in “haste” for the arrival of the agency following the National Health Reform Agreement in 2011.
It arrived just months before COVID-19 hit Australian shores in early 2020, kicking off a period of heavy stress on an already overloaded healthcare system.
This meant that it was possible to use the system to administer the National Partnership on COVID-19 Response package, which delivered an extra $14.3 billion to the states and territories for PCR testing, state-run vaccination clinics and stockpiling of PPE.
Since then, the agency has also realised other efficiency benefits, including in its reporting for the $68 billion in state and federal funding that it delivers to public hospitals every year.
Reports that previously took five months to produce with the former system now take as little as two weeks, allowing staff to focus on other high-value tasks, including analysis and projections.
“It has meant we’re not doing manual work anymore. We’re doing more thinking working and spending time on analysis, so we’ve been able to enhance the transparency of funding,” Mr White told InnovationAus.com.
It is the kind of efficiency that the wider public service can now only dream of, after a review last week urged no new funding for GovERP, which Finance minister Katy Gallagher labelled an “eye-wateringly expensive failure”.
The government last year abandoned the project in favour of a new approach that promises greater autonomy for the 100 agencies that were scheduled to transition to the single across-government SAP platform.
The Department of Finance, which oversaw GovERP until 2021, first disclosed its work on a prototype platform in October 2019 — the same month that NHFB rolled out its payments system.
For Mr White, after a decade of “no errors, no delays, no fraud and no outages” with NHFB payments system, he is thankful that the agency’s core function wasn’t captured by GovERP.
“I am absolutely relieved that our core functions didn’t get wound up into that GovERP process… given all the benefits we’ve delivered over half a decade: $300 billion, no errors, no delays, no fraud, no outages,” he said.
Mr White said going with a new technology was not without its risks, but that budget constraints and a “really bad” existing payments system pushed the agency to try something new.
“On one level, I felt like I didn’t have a choice. It was more risky not to [go with a new technology],” he said of the project undertaken in his first year as the head of the agency.
“But the project team did such a great job of designing it and testing it and making sure it was going to work that once we got to the go live stage, I was extremely confident that we’d done the right thing, and five years later I could not be happier.”
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