ATSICHS Brisbane

"Professional Advantage was really easy to deal with, really responsive, and delivered on our expectations."

Jarryd Aleckson, IT Manager

ATSICHS Brisbane is the largest Indigenous community healthcare organisation in Queensland. It delivers health and human services across its five medical clinics, two dental clinics, three kindergartens, aged care facility, and numerous family and child services programs throughout Brisbane and Logan.

When its IT department embarked on a mailbox migration with Microsoft 365 Exchange Online, it also set the course towards shifting from their traditional office productivity tools. Microsoft 365 opened doors for modernising team collaboration, and empowering mobility, data accessibility, and transparency at ATSICHS Brisbane. With Professional Advantage as ATSICHS Brisbane’s partner implementer for Microsoft 365, it allowed the company to rapidly transform its operations. The timing for their decision to digitise was impeccable as it enabled the majority of ATSICHS Brisbane’s staff to work from home safely when the COVID-19 pandemic hit Australia.

"Being able to access a unified solution that has the scalability, security, and governance that Microsoft 365 does; there’s no competitor that can do it in the same way." 
Jarryd Aleckson, IT Manager, ATSICHS Brisbane

Download your copy of the summarised version of the Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Power Platform stories here.

A new way to communicate and collaborate with SharePoint

The primary driving force of ATSICHS Brisbane’s digital transformation was their desire to make their corporate data more accessible, realise operational efficiencies, and modernise team collaboration. ATSICHS Brisbane previously used file shares to manage and store content, which did not afford their people easy data discovery, quick access to common files, or real-time collaboration.

Professional Advantage provided deep SharePoint expertise, enabling ATSICHS Brisbane to centralise their content in a single repository using a modern Intranet. The Intranet served as their go-to portal for general corporate information, shared document libraries, staff directory, recent announcements, on-demand training, and business unit team sites. SharePoint introduced a better way to collaborate and communicate in ways that no file share could ever support. With SharePoint, ATSICHS Brisbane is now able to co-author documents in real-time, streamline document approvals, track document versions, and centralise organisation-wide communications.

Online team meetings with Microsoft Teams

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across Australia, travel bans and social distancing were mandated. It limited ATSICHS Brisbane’s staff from going between its 10 sites and impacted on provision of services to their clients and patients. With many of their staff sent home, remote working took immediate effect. To ensure continuous staff communication and collaboration, ATSICHS Brisbane tapped into the power of Microsoft Teams.

Traditionally, their communications were mostly done via phone or email, with people travelling between offices for in-person meetings. Having Microsoft Teams in place enabled them to chat, call, and hold meetings online, saving them time from travelling. Microsoft Teams encouraged transparency by allowing team members to see progress on tasks, or what someone was working on. Their people can now access content that matters most to them, and even collaborate efficiently externally, all in a single team communications hub.

During this period, their Teams usage rate grew 1500%. Over 182 teams and 700 channels were created for projects, business units, frontline planning, service delivery, or COVID-19 related content.

"We conducted targeted training and that’s when we really saw the engagement and adoption of Microsoft Teams absolutely skyrocket! That’s when COVID-19 hit and the adoption numbers in its first 30 days increased by 1500% in usage."
Jarryd Aleckson, IT Manager, ATSICHS Brisbane

Improving staff engagement with Yammer

During uncertain times, it became vital for the entire organisation to be confident with their leadership team and highlighted the need for regular and consistent organisational and COVID-19 communications.

Yammer became a central platform for broadcasting company-wide announcements, to disseminate information, or engage with their staff. They held weekly live Q&A sessions with their Senior Medical Officer and senior management staff. This became a good opportunity for people to get answers to their questions and for the leadership team to assure their staff.

ATSICHS Brisbane created Yammer communities for running well-being competitions and for creating “ATSICHS Allstars”, a community for publicly praising their frontliners for a job well done. All these activities grew engagement 10,000% in the first 60 days of introducing Yammer which exceeded all organisational expectations.

"We had weekly live events with our senior management staff and Senior Medical Officer to communicate COVID-19 related information. We also introduced a couple of new communities on Yammer which have been quite successful with good engagement. These are for well-being competitions run by our Learning and Development team and ATSICHS Allstars, which is used to give public praise in the organisation."
Jarryd Aleckson, IT Manager, ATSICHS Brisbane

Automating business processes using Power Apps and Power Automate

A key factor in ATSICHS Brisbane’s digital transformation was improving process automation and control; Professional Advantage developed five processes with electronic forms for ATSICHS Brisbane using Power Apps and Power Automate as a first wave of automation.

Key administrative tasks were streamlined by automating several paper-based processes including ordering uniforms and performing various checklists. With these forms now accessible online, any employee can simply fill them in remotely on their mobile devices at their convenience. This process automation has saved many hours from every administrative process and related management.

Seeing more opportunities for future improvement

Utilising most of the applications in Microsoft 365 has enabled ATSICHS Brisbane to not only get more out of their software investment but also to fully embrace digital transformation at a rapid pace. ATSICHS Brisbane sees rolling out a company-wide implementation of Power BI as part of the next step in its digital transformation and has commenced the journey with Professional Advantage. This will likely bring the next wave of results and transformation to a very important and valued community health service in Queensland.