Case study: eHealth NSW gets a more holistic view of its customers costs

EHealth NSW is a shared service agency within NSW Health, responsible for planning, implementing and supporting ICT and digital capabilities across the state’s public health system.

The digital department needed a better way to help its customers understand how its services are costed.

Warren Clarke, director of finance at eHealth NSW and a member of the Technology Business Management (TBM) council said they replaced their legacy system with TBM to give their customers better insights into the services that the department was charging them.

He said the legacy model used “very simple metrics”, which were not aligned to consumption based data.

“We wanted to use TBM for the transparency, accuracy and accessibility that the discipline offers to give our customers more insights into the services that we were charging them for and providing. [This gives them] a better understanding of the costs of their services that they're consuming,” he said.

Clarke said eHealth has been using TBM for the past 18 months and found good engagement with its internal service owners to determine its total cost of ownership, one of the fundamentals for TBM.

“Once [the customers] grasp the concept, they were enthusiastic in terms of helping identify in the various financial components of this service and then providing the relevant cost profile for the total cost of ownership,” he said.

“There was good engagement with the people that ran the configuration management database so that they're responsible for the consumption based metrics, which underpins TBM in terms of allocating out your costs or your prices to your customers to make sure that they're being charged directly for the services that they consume.”

One of the unexpected insights from implementing TBM was the high engagement from people within the sector, Clarke said.

“The level of interest with within New South Wales Health was has been exceedingly high from customers, service owners, and senior staff. We've also had an unexpected level of engagement, as people are enthusiastic and interested about the whole implementation and processes around it,” he said.

“There's also greater interest around how these concepts can be applied to benefit their own business,” Clarke ended.