A New Era of Health Services Insights: Avocado and Splunk's Transformative Role
Case Study - Grade of Service
About Our Client
Grade of Service
NSW Ambulance provides extensive healthcare services, including paramedic and rescue operations. The organisation plays a crucial role in public health, servicing approximately one-sixth of New South Wales’s 8.1 million inhabitants annually. Its ambition is to revolutionise emergency response through data-driven approaches.
Avocado has collaborated with NSW Ambulance since early 2020. The partnership has been instrumental in advancing the organisation’s innovation and capabilities with the Splunk platform.
The Challenge
How do you best operate a large fleet of mobile workers and vehicles across an 801,200 km² Australian state while ensuring you answer 90% of calls to within 10 seconds?
Answering this question is essential for NSW Ambulance to ensure they comply with their legislated obligations and became even more critical when COVID struck in 2020.
The organisation needed real-time Grade of Service (GoS) insights to maintain optimal healthcare service under unprecedented conditions. The GoS metric comprises several data points, including contact to response time for calls, call centre routing, and dispatch services information.
NSW Ambulance was striving to use the GoS to optimise Control Centre resourcing and management to reduce Triple Zero call waiting times – a task dependent on a transparent, up-to-date, data-driven system.
However, existing IT infrastructure and systems lacked data visibility. NSW Ambulance was relying on 24 hours old data, this made it hard to react quickly and make changes based on Realtime requirements such as staff and ambulance resourcing. The data was hard to access and was not easily readable, making it challenging to understand and analyse from a business operations perspective.
Part of the issue was that the client’s reporting system was a legacy relational database. This sub-optimal data infrastructure did not allow real time reporting.
”“NSW Ambulance has bolstered their performance of critical business services with the new Grade of Service dashboards which form the many tools and decisions they need to make each day. The result, is the ability to monitor the whole health system to better resource through automated procedures which offer simplification and accuracy.”
The Approach:
Avocado recognised the urgent need for a more proactive response system. We developed a solution to upgrade underlying IT infrastructure and techniques and the Grade of Service dashboard.
At the time, NSW Ambulance was already using the Splunk platform. It leveraged Avocado’s flexible Green Managed Services Model and Splunk platform to increase operational efficiency and resilience.
The green services model provides “Buckets of Days” that support companies’ and organisations’ existing teams with certified Avocado professionals. Our skilled experts provide valuable support and innovation abilities to your organisation.
Avocado ensured better visibility into data and accessibility by developing robust, less error-prone data extraction and processing methodologies. This process involved upgrading legacy database and views, laying a solid foundation for deriving insightful data.
This upgrade was achieved thanks to Splunk’s data processing ability as the foundation for feeding a continuous stream of data to the GoS dashboards that provide detailed insight in real-time.
Our approach was based on extensive collaboration with NSW Ambulance’s team. The project began with a workshop with company directors and engaging in conversations with end users to understand their experiences and expectations. This process helped identify specific needs. Our commitment to iterative prototyping also helped ensure the rapid development of a solution tailored to the organisation’s evolving requirements.
The Outcome
Avocado’s collaboration with NSW Ambulance significantly improved the organisation’s operational capacity. The accuracy and timeliness of the GoS dashboard, metrics and associated underlying data processing were vastly improved, enhancing reporting accuracy. NSW Ambulance are now able to react quickly and deliver Realtime visibility based on new requirements that includes rapid prototyping. With the GoS performing how customers expect, NSW Ambulance’s decision-making is uplifted with better rostering and servicing of customers (patient allocation) faster resulting in better outcomes for patients.
Our use of Splunk streamlined operations and contributed to developing an insights rich GoS dashboard. These insights significantly improved decision-making capabilities at all levels of the organisation, from control centre operators to ministerial executives, and fostered an environment for continuous innovation.
Avocado’s flexible managed service model continues to provide operational support to NSW Ambulance. Through the managed services, the client can access highly sought-after Splunk expertise on demand by raising a ticket, as simple as sending an email, and receive prompt attention depending on their Service Level Agreement (SLA).
The organisation has upgraded to Avocado’s Gold Managed Service offering. Under the Gold model, Avocado’s certified professionals collaborate closely with the client to ensure end-to-end management of your environment. Whether on-site or remote, Avocado supports your business and operational requirements.
For NSW Ambulance, one example of the advantages of the managed services agreement was Avocado advising on and enacting a migration to Splunk Cloud. Avocado designed use cases allowing successful migration and effective utilisation of Splunk Cloud.
Since upgrading, the management services also led to further increases in cost savings and minimised downtime.
