About NSW Ambulance
Overview
NSW Ambulance is an integral part of the NSW Health System delivering mobile health services and providing high quality clinical care, rescue, paramedic, and retrieval services to those people of NSW with emergency and medical health needs. They are facing unprecedented demand, with 1 in 6 people in NSW receiving care from NSW Ambulance every year. NSW Ambulance is on a mission to revolutionise the way they respond to emergency calls to provide a health pathway that best meets patient needs, in a clinically appropriate timeframe and manages demand proactively. Avocado have been working with NSW Ambulance since the peak of Covid-19 in early 2020. Avocado have supported their Splunk journey to maturity, where they are now positioned to focus on exciting innovations.
The Challenge
NSW Ambulance operates under strict regulations, requiring them to answer 90 percent of calls within a 10-second timeframe.
The significance of NSW Ambulance’s ability to meet these call-answering expectations extends beyond just their local operations, because there is a national service responsible for handling triple zero emergency calls. Any unanswered or delayed calls could potentially result in a backlog, which in turn would have a cascading effect on all emergency services across Australia, including the Police and Fire departments.
Given the rising demand for emergency services and a workforce that is highly mobile, it becomes increasingly crucial to improve patient flow and ensure that calls are answered promptly and efficiently. Avocado were needed to assist at critical nodes, including State-wide call centres and fleet management.
Some of the challenges experienced were:
- The need to respond to demand for proactive risk mitigation and;
- Need to gain visibility of key metrics such as response time for incoming calls, time to dispatch and time to transfer.
- The need for executive-level visibility into operations during peak demand and media scrutiny, to make critical decisions.
- Alignment with overarching government strategy
- A need to innovate improvements in patient flow and outcomes as part of their strategic goals.
- Sector: Public Sector
- Solutions: Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud
- Services: Avocado Managed Service
”“The Patient Allocation Matrix gives NSW Ambulance a birds eye view of the state’s hospitals and emergency departments, allowing us to see surges in areas and allowing us to better allocate ambulances to provide a greater health system.”
Key solutions – Overcoming mission critical issues with Splunk solutions.
To overcome these challenges, Avocado implemented the following solutions:
- The ability to proactively respond through remediation of Grade of Service (GoS) dashboards. This included the creation of a hierarchy of dashboards that are fit for purpose, with features such as:
- Ministerial Level service rollup
- Executive live view of GOS
- Call centre Manager view of GOS components
- Hospital protocols and statistics
- Local Health District (LHD) level statistics.
- The ability to inform critical decision making with operations management.
- Managed Services to build operational resilience and build out future use cases.
- Enabling moving to Splunk Cloud.
- Uncovering future breakthrough opportunities to improve patient outcomes including onboard fleet tracking and mobile dashboards.
”The dynamic nature of emergency response meant previously relied on historical data was insufficient. By getting the dashboards right, we now make better operational decisions offering a clear picture of the ongoing situation. We have an interactive design that is fit-for-purpose and where changes can be made at speed. Being one step ahead, we provide timely and informed recommendations with actionable insights to Senior Executives. The dashboards have now become a critical application and sit at the top of our priority in their availability and access to operations across our call centres.”
Avocado was initially engaged to undertake dashboard remediation of previously engineered solutions that weren’t meeting their needs for the hospital matrix. They had disparate dashboards, lacked visibility of the whole network and were operating reactively, with data being after the fact. This created issues with ambulances arriving at hospitals that were at capacity.
Avocado rearchitected NSW Ambulance with a more robust data platform that transformed their data into business intelligence. They set up Realtime dashboard alerts and reports including streamlining search capabilities that allowed for critical decision making with operations management.
When the Delta wave hit, there was a new requirement. NSW Ambulance wanted to proactively mitigate risks of new capacity constraints witnessed in Victoria. Avocado quickly pivoted to assist to uplift hospital routing during Covid-19 Delta outbreaks, utilising hospital metrics for how ambulances were allocated based on hospital capacity and ratings based on the patient medical needs and per medical protocol, including 2 new protocols: ‘COVID Suspected’ and ‘COVID Confirmed’ All of this needed to be able to be broken down to individual Local Health Districts (LHDs) to allow decisions to be made by population centres.
Decisions
The ability to make life and death decisions – Operational Management
Avocado worked with NSW Ambulance to build core reporting capabilities in Splunk that were and continue to be used to inform decisions on Ambulance routing to hospitals. With the heart of the operations – the call centre – now significantly streamlined, they were able to correlate the end-to-end journey for NSW Ambulance for better operations management.
This was a critical use case at the peak of Covid when hospitals were operating at full capacity and just-in-time decisions on which hospital to attend could be a matter of life and death. With multiple call centres across Local Health Districts (LHDs), and each with a different threshold capacity, they needed visibility on one screen that allowed them to see when hospitals were changing and approaching thresholds for optimal patient and fleet allocation. They also needed compartmentalisation ability so users could see the data that mattered most to them.
With the ability to see which parts of the state were under pressure, Avocado’s work gained exceedingly high visibility. Their dashboards and solutions were reported daily to the Health Minister who in turn reported them onto the Premier. This unique use case is now used by Splunk globally to highlight the value of their platform and the ingenuity of our Managed Services team to deliver under pressure.
With NSW Ambulance and Avocado pivoting quickly to build GoS dashboards and operational Management, NSW Ambulance now needed to continually refine the data they were seeing in the dashboards to make those decisions. They also wanted to undertake further use case exploration. NSW Ambulance leveraged Avocado’s flexible Managed Service model, choosing their Green Support service – consisting of Operational Management Support, giving them buckets of days to augment existing teams during business hours; whether it be to request training, maintenance of a current use case, adding an additional use case, or rearchitecting some of their solutions.
Over time, NSW Ambulance moved to a Gold Managed service and as a result they are expanding increased use cases. The Gold Service is a complete management of their Splunk platform 24×7 on-call service. NSW Ambulance are now receiving a greater ROI on their Splunk usage leading to greater adoption. Splunk has displaced other reporting platforms to become the primary data aggregation, correlation and reporting platform for all of NSW Ambulance. For NSW Ambulance, they now can scale their Splunk instance while delivering operational expertise around best practice, while avoiding incidents.
”“It’s been a real collaborative experience working with Avocado, there was iterative input into decisions to get the dashboards right, and we’re now exploring more innovations. Avocado's commitment to agility and speed aligns perfectly with our operational needs, allowing us to respond rapidly to changing situations. That’s been the key aspect of these insights and our ongoing engagement with Avocado – it doesn’t have an IT time lag. It’s about speed and response, which is important for our operations.” Iain McGregor, Director, Information and Digital Services (CIO)
More use cases
Designing and fulfilling more use cases
One use case Avocado have helped them to achieve under the managed service is Cloud Migration. With NSW Ambulance strategic plans being linked to NSW Health, and NSW health mandating a move to Splunk Cloud, Ambulance needed to overcome difficult use cases that were preventing them from migrating to Splunk Cloud. Avocado were engaged to design use cases so that they could successfully migrate and use Splunk cloud effectively.
Future innovations – uncovering breakthrough opportunities.
With trust now built between the capabilities of the Splunk platform and Avocado’s expertise, NSW Ambulance can focus on creating innovative use cases to solve their future needs that supports both the critical infrastructure of Ambulance NSW Services, and the safety of their fleet with advanced technologies. While Avocado continue to manage original use cases, they have also taken on new business intelligence use cases and reporting, enabling NSW Ambulance to deliver with certainty.
In November of 2022, Avocado was asked by NSW Ambulance to participate in a showcase for Queensland Ambulance Service (QAS), to demonstrate how NSW Ambulance had managed data services through the pandemic. A key success factor highlighted by NSW Ambulance directors was the partnership with Avocado to provide Splunk services on demand through both professional and managed services.
