Better Health Network (BHN) is preparing to kick of a transformation program next year following completion of the merger integration that led to its formation.
BHN is the combination of Central Bayside Community Health Services (CBCHS), Connect Health & Community and Star Health.
The not-for-profit community healthcare organisation is based in the south of Melbourne, covering around over 20 sites, and has a workforce of more than 1000 staff and volunteers.
Executive director of transformation Amrita Ahluwalia told Digital Nation that with integration work expected to be completed by a December 2024 deadline, the team is ready to move into a transformation of services and operations.
Ahluwalia said the organisation “made a very deliberate decision” to integrate first before kicking off its transformation program in 2025, rather than run both simultaneously.
Transformation, Ahluwalia said, is “about how do we now collectively make things better within BHN, whether it’s about going for a new system, a new technology, or doing something different in our client experience space.”
BHN has emerged from the integration work with a slimmer application estate, a complete picture of its present state, and strategies to cover data, digital and client experience.
A wider business review is also underway to “understand what we need to fix for the new organisation to be future-ready.”
“That will inform our transformation program that goes live next year,” she said.
Sticking to “tight” timelines
Integration started in early 2023, with a two-year window of time to complete the works.
Being government-funded, BHN ran the integration work in-house. “We did not have funding to employ an army of consultants to help us,” Ahluwalia said.
The constituent organisations were also emerging from the pandemic era, and going straight into a complex merger, which led to some challenges.
There was little “lead time to establish trust with the three leadership teams needed to be mindful of a Covid-fatigued workforce,” Ahluwalia said.
“It became clear for us that we needed a solution that was digital, so we could collaborate online, and that was not sitting in one legacy organisation’s IT environment, so we could all collaborate.”
BHN set up Monday.com as “a neutral territory online for the three organisations to come and collaborate.”
“It gave us full transparency, visibility and trust of all the work that was happening for integration,” she said.
“All our integration work [and progress updates] lived in Monday.com. It’s been the same single source of truth for our staff to know where we’re sitting with integration progress and reporting up to the board, which was very easy to do in the one platform, cascading that reporting up and down.”
Ahluwalia said the system aided executive communications around the integration works.
“For my CEO, for example, anytime he asked me the question, ‘How are we going with integration?’, I could give him a spot-on number, which is very hard to achieve without that technology,” she said.
“The board got reports every second month over the two-year period, with very spot-on specific numbers of how we’re tracking and … what was remaining.”