At the RLDatix Virtual Connections’ event, Leanne Lind, the Policy Governance Lead at St John of God Health Care presented her organisation’s experience delivering an enterprise-wide policy management solution.

Through the procurement and implementation of a single source of truth, the project delivered consolidated and standardised policies, procedures, and toolkits, across St John of God Health Care’s Hospitals and Services.

Who is St John of God Health Care?

St John of God Health Care is one of the largest Catholic providers of health care services in Australia. Established in Western Australia in 1895, they are a not-for-profit private health care group and employ more than 15,500 staff across Australia and New Zealand.

They operate 27 facilities comprising more than 3,300 hospital beds in Australia and New Zealand, as well as home nursing, disability services and social outreach programs.

The vision for a single source of truth

St John of God Health Care aimed to achieve a future state where all caregivers, which included St John of God Health Care caregivers, VMOs, contractors, students and volunteers could access policies, procedures and toolkits anywhere, anytime and from any device from an electronic single source of truth. This vision would see the Policy Library contribute to:

• Alignment to National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) standards
• A reduction in the risk that comes with outdated policies that are past review
• A reduction in non-compliance with policies through risk and audit controls
• The ability for all caregivers to read and acknowledgement with tracking
• An electronic approval workflow for policies

St John of God Health Care had a policy library of over 8,000 documents, which spanned clinical, governance, corporate services and social outreach. The Audit Risk Committee identified the risk associated with how their documents were managed across the organisation and initiated action to mitigate this risk.  They had an ambitious goal, by the end of the implementation, to reduce that figure down, to approximately 750 policy records through governance, standardisation and integration.

To ensure the project met these key requirements the following criteria was applied to every policy written as a single source of truth:

• Alignment to the NSQHS standards
• Alignment to the St John of God Health Care Strategy
• Auditable
• Application to Legislative compliance
• Application of implementation, communication and evaluation planning
• Application of Accuracy, Appropriateness and Accessibility principles.

Selecting and Implementing the Right Solution

St John of God Health Care embarked on procurement process that saw the compilation of approximately 50 mandatory functional requirements through a Request for Tender.  They sought a centrally managed, cloud-based platform that would align with their future state vision.

After an in-depth review of four vendors, only two met the rigorous requirements, and, with the cloud-based offering, RLDatix’s PolicyStat was selected to be St John of God Health Care’s preferred solution to successfully deliver their vision.

It’s been a wonderful experience being involved with the PolicyStat team

Leanne Lind at Virtual Connections 2021

During the implementation of PolicyStat, St John of God Health Care acknowledged the application the organisational Strategy needed required effective change management and a top-down project approach was initiated. The change management was sponsored by the Executive Group, who partnered with the Policy Governance Team and individual hospital and service ‘Site Champions’.  This approach ensured there were platforms for communication between levels of involvement, including one-on-one meetings and forums with clear escalation pathways.  The escalation pathways and governance of the project were integral to success, particularly while many states struggled with the effects of COVID-19.  This ensured that the clinical care delivered at the hospitals and services was not affected by the journey towards a successful implementation.

Outcomes

At the time of Leanne Lind’s presentation in October 2021, St John of God Health Care had gone live to the organisation’s Super Users. One key factor was to ensure that the project was structured around measurable deliverables for the hospitals & services that they could benchmark. St John of God Health Care had transitioned from or 8,000 documents, to approximately 1,500 across the group:

• Organisation wide documents increased by 24%. These documents are used by everyone across the organisation, and are now centrally managed, reducing the administration work and risks that come with duplicated or variable policies.
• The average reduction of documents managed at individual sites reduced by 84%
• One site saw a reduction in individually managed policies reduce by 98%