St John Ambulance Western Australia went through a big learning curve regarding its business intelligence when it made its first acquisition in primary health care a few weeks ago. It did so with the comfort of information provided by its upgraded enterprise performance management (EPM) system.
St John Ambulance started in WA in the 1890s and had been looking at avenues for growth and identified an opportunity in the primary healthcare market. Its acquisition of Apollo Health brought four primary health clinics across the Perth metropolitan area into its business, allowing the organization to expand beyond emergency care through an expanded business model that included alternative care pathways that could help keep patients out of emergency departments.
The non-profit organization had been using an earlier version of an on-premise EPM system, but with all the opportunities it had to consider, “we needed to get our systems up to speed,” says Finance and Administration Director Antony Smithson.
St John knew it wanted a cloud-based system. The organization covers all of Western Australia, with the state being the largest area in the world covered by a single ambulance service, and now staff working remotely have the same access as those in Perth. Having staff distributed over many locations also meant it needed an EPM system that was easy for its employees to use.
Smithson wanted a system that was scalable, could be accessed remotely, and was intuitive, so work wasn’t held up because someone had to be contacted for an answer.
