The Disability Trust integrates data to optimise care

The Disability Trust has adopted a new platform to create a single view of its clients and participants and enable staff to optimise care.

The Disability Trust's (The Trust) new single-view approach means the non-for-profit can better recognise participant and client needs as staff can access one clear view of up-to-date and accurate information and provide personalised support to each participant.

Speaking to iTnews, head of ICT Ian Treweek clarified the difference between a client and a participant, stating “a participant is who we are providing care for” while “a client could be their family and community… their legal guardian, their direct family, an auntie or uncle. It depends on who looks after them.”

The Trust has 1800 employees and care staff who provide a range of services to support more than 4000 people with disability across NSW, the ACT, Victoria and South East Queensland.

The Trust is working towards consolidating data from its various applications including its content management system, Microsoft Active Directory, risk management, finance, human resources, and sales.

The organisation chose Boomi’s integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) and master data hub (MDH) software to implement the changes.

It also used the vendor’s API and API management capabilities to set up a consistent employee onboarding process, including removing the need for manual data entry for new starters.

Treweek told iTnews that prior to getting an integration solution, “we had seven or eight relatively large applications that really didn't talk to each other at all”.

“We did a lot of data duplication [caused by] manual entry, multiple people entering the same information," he said.

"We made a decision 12 months ago to look at what we need to do to integrate these solutions.”

He said the organisation is moving to a new care system and part of the foundational work "is basically getting all the integrations between all those systems".

Treweek said part of this will see its employee onboarding process become automated, removing human errors that can naturally occur from manual input.

While implementation is still “very much in progress”, the project is about to enter its user acceptance testing phase, with the team cleaning up data in The Trust’s systems ready for go-live in a “couple of months.”

The shift will also have a tremendous impact on the Trust’s ability to fulfil obligations under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Treweek said the move means staff will be able to better track a participant's goals and provide feedback to their families and their communities - something it already does, but could improve on.

“This underlying change to the systems we're doing will allow us to provide that feedback faster, better, more accurately," he said.

The shift to cloud

The Trust is also working through a migration from on-premises systems to the cloud, which is also underpinned by Boomi.

“From a strategic point of view, The Trust was going to cloud for all of our business applications, our critical apps, and we'll go to public cloud for some of our management stuff," he said.

Treweek said finalising this effort is dependent on the integration capability as well as some decisions around some key applications.

The organisation's care system, for example, will be transitioned to be Salesforce-based so that it is cloud-native.

Other applications and workloads that are currently hosted on-premises can be migrated directly to the cloud.

He said the organisation is moving to cloud "where appropriate” and that as a non-profit operating in the disability services sector, "it made sense to push our business-critical systems into the cloud.”

“My end goal from a strategic point of view is to have all the systems talking and then have a central repository of that data and provide the data to our business so can make good business decisions," Treweek said.

This goal is roughly “12 months away” from achievement as The Trust builds out its foundations.

On the data side, the idea is to use Boomi to bring data to a new data warehouse and then use "a bit of AI to give the business the right information that they need.”