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Australia’s National Diabetes Services Scheme (NDSS) has overhauled its IT and technology systems with the help of Atturra and KPMG.
The NDSS, which helps people with diabetes cope with the disease, turned to Microsoft’s Power Apps platform and the Dynamics 365 suite of services as part of a four-year ‘enhancement project’.
Atturra was used to build a portal for health professionals, event management and NDSS registrants following an extensive research project carried out in 2018.
“The original system was focused on product supply, rather than client data management and communications,” said Tony Wynd, director of the department’s NDSS enhancements section. “Many transactions, including for registration and product access, were conducted on paper forms only.
“The NDSS has more than 100,000 new people register each year. If someone was newly diagnosed with diabetes, their health professional would fill out the form with the patient and then the form had to be scanned, emailed or mailed and the NDSS team would then plug it into the system.”
The main aim of the NDSS Enhancements Project was to create a “digital-by-default, registrant-centric and outcome-focused process to assist in the self-management of diabetes”.
It will also include a portal for the community pharmacies that supply products and a central finance system to manage all NDSS financial data, processes and reporting services, which will be developed by KPMG. According to NDSS, the finance system will provide access to operational and policy information that will enable administration and future development of the enhancement scheme.
Following its official launch in July 2022, NDSS replaced its paper-based processes with a digital option. This enabled approximately 600 health professionals create log in details, with more than 90 per cent validated almost instantly, allowing them to start registering patients and submitting forms.
NDSS also integrated multiple capabilities under one solution, such as analysis and reporting on registrant integrations.
While the NDSS and Atturra were developing the portal, an Australian government policy change made subsidised continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and flash glucose monitoring (FGM) devices available to a larger cohort of NDSS registrants.
As a result, NDSS, Atturra and KPMG tweaked the cloud suites to deliver the products to newly eligible NDSS Registrants via the Health Professional Portal.
The NDSS upgrade is in its final year and on track to deliver the remaining planned capabilities to Diabetes Australia by mid-2023.
This is not the first time Atturra has worked with a business in the healthcare industry, as it worked with Australian health fund Peoplecare back in July to centralise its business-critical systems and legacy cloud applications.
