Empowering users to drive their own outcomes: How Barwon Health equipped their staff to procure PPE efficiently during COVID.

Have you ever had to react to an emergency? A drastic change of circumstance, shifting the way you operate from your usual daily routines? It’s confusing at best and stressful at worst. This is why we create and practice Disaster Recovery plans.  In theory, you can plan for anything. In practice, perhaps not. 

For our many healthcare workers and institutions, they have had to proactively predict and constantly react to changing regulations and circumstances pertaining to the handling of the global pandemic. 

Barwon Health is a health care provider in Australia, with services ranging from hospital, rehabilitation, elderly care, community health centres and mental health services employing around 6,000 persons, of which the majority are in front-line patient care. As a major provider for healthcare services, they have taken a very proactive approach to handling the results of the pandemic from testing clinics, to ICU and general patient care within regional Victoria. Barwon’s vision is that everyone in the community enjoys the best healthcare and wellbeing. They are also committed to delivering a seamless experience for all stakeholders – patients, suppliers, and staff.

At the inception of the pandemic, Barwon was undergoing a significant software transformation to help modernize their core applications in their back-office and how that would affect outcomes leveraged by their front office.

I spoke to David Morrison, Product Manager at Barwon Health, to understand their journey in transitioning to a modern application platform built on Oracle solutions. David has been managing and overseeing various process and program changes for over 12 years.

Accelerating Go-Live Readiness

To provide a seamless experience for their users to drive enhanced business outcomes, Barwon Health migrated to Oracle Cloud ERP (Financials) and Oracle Procurement Cloud in July and October 2020, respectively. The move to Oracle Cloud allowed their teams to simplify processes which increased the speed of operations, ensured data accuracy for compliance adherence, and drove continuous innovation.

With any significant change, a large adaptation process must occur to ensure success.

“We had certain challenges we had to overcome in enabling our 1,500 staff to move to remote, online learning [of the systems],” Morrison said. 

As there was urgency to migrate users successfully onto their new systems, Barwon Health turned to Oracle Guided Learning (OGL) to help meet their needs.

OGL is a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) that empowers users to learn in the flow of work (in application), facilitating increased adoption of SaaS, providing effective continuous change management, and optimizing resources needed to service and support maintenance users’ application needs. By deploying OGL, Barwon ensured all users were ready and supported to use Oracle Cloud from day one.

“Within a few weeks of engagement, the team at Oracle University was able to implement, configure, test, and deploy all guides for stakeholder use,” Morrison said. “[OU] worked as a partner to ensure we were able to deliver the support we needed to enable our users to engage with Oracle Cloud.”

Engaging Users Effectively

To manage the escalating concerns presented within the pandemic, the Victorian Government developed a response plan (called the COVID-19 Road Map) which instituted various guidelines and responses each health district and entity should take in the event of changing transmission levels in the community. One such risk rating, COVID-Peak, mandated the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for all patient care. As the pandemic continued to fluctuate between the various risk levels, Barwon Health was able to use OGL to proactively engage their users to help inform them of key critical plan changes.

“During COVID-Peak, we saw the utilization of Oracle Procurement Cloud increase by 40-times,” Morrison said.  “Many of these users had limited experience in engaging within the platform as they were front-line workers. We were able to use Oracle Guided Learning to help inform and guide these users to complete their procurement of PPE materials in a timely and effective manner with minimal external help needed.”

This experience of communicating in application (via OGL’s Messaging Editor) and in the flow of the process (via OGL’s Splash Tips and Beacons) increased the effectiveness of front-line workers to complete their transactions successfully while reducing average service desk calls/tickets by 10-times.

“Having information readily available in-the flow of work in-application is the real value of Oracle Guided Learning, at the time users need it, which outside tools aren’t able to provide that,” added Morrison.

Barwon Health also leverages OGL across various other functions including how they guide users to create new suppliers, help users clarify financial costs, and communicate upcoming maintenance windows. They have seen a reduction in human error rates from completing these key processes which helps build staff efficiency and increase data accuracy.

“Oracle Guided Learning (OGL) is a powerful tool which empowers our users to become more self-sufficient when navigating our business processes,” said Morrison.

In short, the flexibility and features offered by Oracle Guided Learning allow Barwon Health to deliver an improved employee experience when using Oracle Financials and Procurement Cloud.  Barwon Health is continuing to rollout OGL and will look to provide role-based specific information in upcoming releases.

Learn more about Oracle Guided Learning or read Barwon's full success story.

To connect with the authors please email: Chris.supangat@oracle.com