Architecture for a contract management system built to grow beyond one health service

The challenge

WA Country Health Service (WACHS) provides health services to regional Western Australia: more than 500,000 people across more than 2.5 million square kilometres. Its network includes six large regional health campuses, 15 district health campuses, 46 small hospitals, and 43 health centres and nursing posts, along with community-based and inpatient mental health services.

As part of its multi-year Medical Workforce Change Program, WACHS committed to a new central contract management solution on Microsoft Dynamics 365. It would replace several legacy systems and simplify how contracts for the medical workforce are generated and managed. WACHS engaged us to develop the solution architecture together with the delivery vendor. To streamline processes and reduce double handling, the solution had to integrate with key WACHS systems, including the TRIM records management system and Adobe Sign, so clinicians could sign contracts electronically.

The scope soon grew. The design had to extend from WACHS alone to multiple Health Service Providers, and to integrate with a new state-wide credentialing system and HR system that Health Support Services was rolling out in parallel. Several of the systems it connected to were being decommissioned and replaced during the project, and the live rostering system had to keep working throughout.

Our approach

We mapped the data handled by the contract management processes to its source and target systems at each stage of the transition, and developed an integration roadmap setting out the integration patterns and services for each stage. Detailed process maps and integration specifications (service contracts) captured the data requirements and patterns for every integrated system. The solution design was developed in ongoing liaison with the IT design authority.

We architected the new Dynamics 365 contract management solution to be decoupled from the existing Dynamics 365 rostering solution, so each can evolve independently during the transition.

We also designed and built a dedicated integration platform on Azure Integration Services. It runs entirely in a secured private network and uses infrastructure as code and DevOps pipelines to deploy integration components from development, through test, to production. On the same platform we built a file scanning service that scans and processes files uploaded to the Dynamics 365 application in real time.

The outcome

WA Health now has a dedicated integration platform in its Azure tenancy that is ready for DevOps and aligned with the Department's Azure reference architectures and standards.

It lets the contract management solution move from the legacy HR and rostering source systems to the target state over 18 months, and be extended and rolled out beyond WACHS to other Health Service Providers.