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Carrington Health & healthAbility – Case Study

Carrington Health & healthAbility Systems Merger Delivers a Positive Outcome

Carrington Health and healthAbility officially merged in July 2018. As a result, the two healthcare entities needed to map out a way forward, reviewing processes and merging financial management systems. To help achieve the goals the organisation chose Evolution Business Systems to migrate and consolidate the two systems. The early results have seen streamlined processes, reduced paper flows and a day saved each month in reporting.

The challenge: Two merged organisations needing one system to move forward

“We were operating as two separate businesses for some time, planning a lot of back office integration pieces, including the finance system,” said Mr Mark Terry, General Manager – Finance and IT, “As part of the merger, we had an external IT consultant come in and have a look at both organisation’s IT infrastructure to determine how we would roadmap our way forward. We had a pretty good idea at the early stages of what things we wanted to do based on that preparation.  Carrington Health were using AX, and healthAbility were running Microsoft Navision (NAV). The latter was considered to be the most suitable product out of the two that each entity was using at the time. So that was the starting point.”

“We have seen a number of efficiencies. We’ve been able to streamline processes across both sites through having the one system.”
Mark Terry
Mark Terry
General Manager, Finance & IT

 

The journey: Merging financial data and streamlining processes

The merger of the two organisations saw Carrington Health’s AX system decommissioned and the healthAbility platform built upon and expanded to enable Carrington to merge financially to NAV. Mr Terry highlighted that the implementation was smooth due to the internal knowledge they had available to them, “It was very smooth, considering previous implementations I’ve gone through in the past. We benefited because we had a couple of people who were already familiar with the systems and processes of NAV from healthAbility, so we had the internal knowledge that we could share. Also, we had some really good planning and preparation sessions with EBS before we went too far down the track of doing any implementation work. That way we were all clear on the best way to leverage the platform in the migration, given that we have two organisations that are working in the same industry. There’s a lot of similarities and overlap in the way they work.”

As part of the implementation, they also chose Continia Document Capture to help with invoice scanning and Jet reports for month-end reporting. Mr Terry explained, “It was thought that we could introduce a new platform for the invoice scanning as part of that implementation, which was new to the healthAbility team. Given that we are operating on two sites, and the accounts payable function primarily rests in one site, the ability to then be able to capture invoices through PDF scanning would get us over this hurdle of avoiding lots of paper flow transfer between the two sites.”

“The document capture was only introduced in the last month or so, and we’re still progressing the number of invoices that are going through Continia. There’s been a fair bit of setting up that needs to happen at the start, as we get invoices for the first time, but essentially the scanning side is all happening now. The big benefit for us is that the invoices are then tied specifically to the transaction in the system and from an auditing point of view, and an invoice recovery point of view, we have easy access to those scanned invoices. The next step that we’re now beginning to progress is pushing the invoice approval stage out through the workflow to enable managers to approve the invoices as well as have them scanned in the system.”

The outcome: Reports produced in 5 minutes

Merging to one financial management system has seen many efficiencies and streamlined processes at Carrington Health and HealthAbility. Mr Terry said, “I think we have seen a number of efficiencies. We’ve been able to streamline processes across both sites through having the one system. The system functionality that’s driving efficiencies is in the bank reconciliation area. The ability to have the auto-bank reconciliation functionality pre-set – which AX didn’t have – has reduced the amount of time in the receipting processes.”

“There’s also a lot of simplicity around being able to extract information. The way the system’s set up, makes it a lot easier to find information quickly and then draw it out quickly through exports if we’re analysing data.”

Another huge benefit is the efficiencies gained by implementing Jet Reports. “From a month-end point of view we’ve seen a lot of improvements in efficiency, because of how Jet Reports can be pre-set in order to populate month-end reports very quickly without cutting and pasting. Essentially, our month-end reporting is an integration to NAV and as soon as month end’s done, it’s really a five-minute job for the reports to just appear, so that’s been a big benefit for us.” From Carrington Health’s point of view, it has saved a huge amount of time which would amount to saving approximately $10,000 per year. Mr Terry recalls, 

 “On the AX side, it was integrated with a very old system that probably took about 24 hours to do what we’re getting in five minutes.”

 

The future: Looking towards the cloud

Now that the implementation is complete, Carrington Health and healthAbility are looking to the future and are optimistic at what they see as they look towards upgrading NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central. Mr Terry says, “I think the fact that it is a cloud-based solution for us is attractive, because it means that we’re taking the pressure off the internal network environments. That is a drawcard for us. But secondly, I think as a result of that, we’re hoping that the workflow across multiple locations without having to install client-based version on everyone’s machine will be a benefit across sites as well. So effectively, they’re all utilising the system from that one cloud hosted location rather than trying to have trust arrangements in place and sharing it between networks etc.”

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Your guide to financial management software in community health 

Keep pace with evolving funding streams, client services and
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As your clients’ needs for affordable, accessible and equitable
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multiple funding streams and services you offer?

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