Switching off emailed requests with a service portal people use

The challenge

East Metropolitan Health Service (EMHS) runs an extensive hospital and health service network for the more than 725,500 Western Australians in its catchment. Its Data and Digital Innovation (DDI) team handles all data and reporting requests, including data cubes, dashboards and Power BI reports, along with digital innovation work for a wide group of stakeholders.

The team's Jira Service Management portal had been set up a decade earlier. It was dated, complex and hard to use, so most requests arrived by email, without the information needed to resolve them efficiently.

DDI wanted a new way of working in which every request carried the key information, was easy to triage and was visible to stakeholders, so they could help prioritise the work for their area. Because request data was often medical, it also had to be hosted in Australia, with the ability to restrict specific requests to a specific set of people.

Our approach

We started with discovery: what were the pain points with the old portal, why weren't customers using it, and how did DDI want to operate?

We then delivered incrementally, putting features in users' hands early and building, testing and refining the solution week by week. Automation took over the approval process, including collecting signatures, and other repetitive tasks.

The new portal cut the request types from 17 to 8. A single Kanban board replaced more than 18 queues for viewing, filtering and progressing requests through a new workflow. Jira dashboards let Health Service Provider leads see the progress of their items and prioritise what is done next. Data residency and issue-level security keep DDI's Jira data in Australia and make access easy to restrict.

The outcome

Every request now comes through the new portal, and emailed requests are switched off. That saves a great deal of back and forth chasing missing information, and gives the team a shared view of requests and responses.

The visual way of working supports how DDI wanted its process to run. Triage and prioritisation mean the right things are worked on in the right order, and the team finds it easier to manage customer and stakeholder expectations.