Murray City Country Coast (MCCC) GP Training is part of a national network of training providers that offers specialist training for qualified doctors who want to pursue a career in general practice medicine. Established in January 2016 after a merger, the MCCC GP Training footprint spans western regional and rural Victoria, and the greater western and northern metropolitan Melbourne area, covering approximately 40% of the city’s population base.
Doctors who join the Australian General Practice Training program offered by Murray City Country Coast develop their specialist skills and knowledge through supervised work placements in hospitals and accredited GP teaching practices that service the health needs of metropolitan, regional and remote communities across Victoria.
MCCC is committed to growing the next generation of GPs for its diverse communities. To achieve this, MCCC partners with general practices and links directly with universities, primary health networks, hospitals, State and Federal Governments, and local communities with the goal of developing a qualified and motivated GP workforce for the region.
A ‘day one’ directive
At its formation, MCCC faced a range of information management and service delivery challenges, so a new training and business platform was an organisational imperative. In summary, MCCC needed to:
- integrate the management and delivery of training requirements for GP registrars who were part way through their training,
- induct a cohort of new GP registrars who were joining the GP training program in the region,
- find ways to integrate inherited legacy data systems from multiple organisations that previously delivered GP training across the MCCC training footprint, and
- submit progress reports that would integrate directly with the Department of Health’s Registrar Information Data Exchange (RIDE), a reporting platform for the national GP training network of providers.
Given this operational context, MCCC wanted to establish a platform to meet the needs of MCCC staff, medical educators, host teaching practices, the Australian Government and partners.
“From day one, our strategic directive was to not invest in any major hardware or network,” said Kelvin de Waele, MCCC’s Acting Chief Information Officer.
“We needed cloud-based solutions. And of course, we needed a hosting provider.”
Making a choice
MCCC assessed a range of options, including incumbent solutions used by organisations who came together to form the new entity.
Fusion5’s Specialist360 solution attracted MCCC’s attention because fellow national GP training providers WAGPET and EVGPT were using the platform and it had the ability to meet their compliance reporting requirements for the Department of Health.
“We selected Specialist360 because it had a wide user base, and we considered it a safe option given that it came from an organisation with multiple developers and support people behind it,” said Kelvin.
“Specialist360 is helping MCCC achieve its key operational objectives because it brings training, learning management and CRM systems together to create a collaborative environment for the GP training provider, our medical educators, GP Supervisors, and Registrars.”
The implementation timeframe was short.
From selecting Specialist360 to go-live took just months, despite the complications posed by extracting and importing data from multiple databases.
Confidence in the Cloud
MCCC chose Fusion5’s Cloud5 platform to host Specialist360 because it offered a consolidated application stack and infrastructure and simplified complexity.
Managed by a dedicated team, Cloud5 is backed by the Microsoft Azure platform. The Cloud5 data centre is located in Australia, and gives MCCC over 99% uptime, full disaster recovery, consistent performance, and an enhanced ability to rapidly deploy computing power to meet the organisation’s needs on a day-to-day basis.
“We wanted to use software-as-as-service (SaaS) or Cloud-based solutions, because we didn’t want to put our own hardware infrastructure in place,” said Kelvin.
“Cloud5 was hosting Specialist360 for organisations similar to MCCC, so we were confident that they knew what they needed to do, and they did. It was deployed very quickly.”
Kelvin says the relationship with Cloud5 has been issue-free.
“Any time we've needed something, the company has responded quickly and delivered what we asked for.”
While the completely new platform required a little settling in time from the user perspective, Kelvin says the fact that it was in the Cloud posed few problems. “From our users’ perspective, the availability of the solution, and its running speed, has been excellent.”
“From our users’ perspective, the availability of the solution, and its running speed, has been excellent.”
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