Queensland Health's digital passport built in months in SAP BTP

Queensland Health used SAP cloud services to create a “digital passport” that consolidates all credential and training data for clinical staff in one place, allowing them to relocate more quickly.

The digital health passport to support health worker mobility is a central tenet of HEALTHQ32, the state government’s 10-year vision for the future of healthcare in Queensland. 

While the vision was only announced in early May, Queensland Health revealed it already had a staff digital passport ready for testing. 

Senior director of corporate technology services Carlo Terribile told the SAP NOW ANZ 2023 summit that the agency took a different approach to usual, and had “SAP and their developers” build a “minimum viable product” on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which is what SAP now calls its cloud services.

Terribile said the short timeframe put on having a digital passport ready for staff testing meant doing things differently.

“We really needed to come up with something in a pretty quick timeframe,” he said.

“I think we briefed SAP in February-March, they delivered a proof-of-concept for us in a pretty short timeframe, which was great, and then we started building in June and went technically live [in early August], and we’ll start to roll it out to the business shortly.

“I am confident that if we used the traditional process that we have used we wouldn’t have got there.”

Health worker mobility

The digital passport has been reported in the context of allowing Queensland Health to deliver high-quality patient care outcomes by being able to more quickly shift staff around to fill gaps and meet demand for critical care services.

The structure of Queensland Health’s operations means data is siloed and processes vary.

“If we just look at credentialling data, it sits in many different data sources right across the organisation,” Terribile said.

“We’re actually made up of 16 separate hospital and health services, they’re all independent organisations, as well as the department, so everybody does things perhaps a little bit differently, and it’s just a matter of bringing this all together.”

Currently, moving doctors, nurses and allied health professionals around the state takes time, as staff information about credentials and mandatory training needs to be brought together on a case-by-case basis.

“What the digital passport is meant to be doing is bringing that all together into one location so that it’s easy for the right people in the organisation, those authorised users, to be able to get the information they need, to be able to allow that [staff mobility] to happen,” Terribile said.

While SAP did the initial solution design and assembly, Terribile said that a “representation from the business were involved in the design” and then through a subsequent five-week sprint process.

“We were always true to those [Agile] user stories and making sure that we were going back to that and checking back with the business about that, because it’s all about user acceptance,” Terribile said.

When Terribile presented on August 8, the digital passport was yet to be “used in anger” - that is, in production. 

Once that occurred, Terribile expected to receive feedback “about the accuracy of the data, the usability of the actual product and the application in production, and what changes that perhaps need to be developed.”

Given it was developed as a minimum viable product, due to the truncated timeframe, some extra work was always anticipated; Terribile flagged “several tranches” to occur “further down the track which will develop this - add more data as move through this process, and ultimately what we’re looking to do is answer that original question of, ‘Is the mobility for clinicians around Queensland Health better than it is today?’

While SAP was heavily involved from the outset, Terribile added that his team in corporate technology services - which is responsible for workforce management, payroll, HR, finance, logistics, procurement and supply chain - is now making changes to the digital passport themselves.

Through the approach taken, he said they could be confident that “what we’ve got is something that works and will work for us and the business” from day one, and that they can develop themselves on an ongoing basis.

Terribile added that, as the agency was working with a relatively new offering from SAP, some of the “contracting arrangements” were “challenging”.

“SAP is now in an area around privacy, data protection and even liability which is quite different to where it used to be, and these cloud platforms and the approach is something that we had to really work our way through,” Terribile said.

“That was challenging and I think it’ll continue to be challenging as we start to adopt this and other cloud platforms a little bit more, but we moved a little, SAP moved a little and we got there in the end.”