Mercy Health

Mercy Health is a non-for-profit health care organisation that is committed to maintaining and building its position as a quality provider of health, aged care and community services. Founded by the Sisters of Mercy, Mercy Health has grown to be at the forefront of healthcare and advocacy in Australia.

Mercy Health has experienced accelerated business growth, which has highlighted challenges in managing the organisation’s policies and procedures as well as keeping data current and readily available for all employees. In the legacy environment, problems have arisen as employees faced challenges locating appropriate documents, due to information being stored in multiple locations. In addition, Mercy Health’s intranet (based on an aging Ektron platform) was causing a bottleneck for information management, as content authors needed specialist skills to maintain content. This, led to out-of-date or inaccurate information being used for decision making and a general loss of productivity.

It was clear that Mercy Health had outgrown its current environment. To achieve its desired productivity improvements Mercy Health would need to address a number of issues including:

1. Switch to a technology platform that was easier to use and did not require specialist technical skills to manage content
2. Move the public facing website and intranet onto a cloud-based platform to minimise the need for infrastructure skills
3. Upgrade and consolidate a variety of legacy SharePoint 2003 & 2010 applications to SharePoint 2013 to simplify updates

In 2014, Mercy Health stakeholders saw that there was a need to address these problems and to implement a solution that would;

• Support sustainable delivery of the organisation’s data into the future
• Align to their strategic objective to strengthen their position as an efficient, effective and responsive provider of public health services
• Provide a framework for team based collaboration workspaces

To address these needs and ensure a speedy deployment, Mercy Health engaged FiveP Australia to implement an information-management strategy based on the Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. As a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner, FiveP has extensive experience with its consultants having delivered SharePoint solutions since 2005. In addition to its expert understanding of the SharePoint platform, FiveP has a depth of knowledge in migrating content from legacy Content Management Systems (CMS) such as Ektron. The successful result of the project meant Mercy Health was able to decommission the three legacy platforms into a singular consolidated platform. Specialist content updating skills were also no longer required with a team of more than a dozen people quickly trained to manage the website and intranet content themselves.

FiveP’s solution, based on the SharePoint 2013 platform, has changed the way Mercy Health’s employees work. They are now empowered to communicate, share knowledge and collaborate more efficiently, directly impacting their ability to provide quality health services. Navigation and search are much more intuitive than before and users are benefiting from automated document version control.

The strong partnership between Mercy Health and FiveP was essential to the project’s success. Mercy Health now has the tools, knowledge and skills to take full advantage of its investment, continually enhancing their organisations effectiveness.

“At Mercy Health, we’re continually striving to strengthen our position as an efficient, effective and responsive provider of public health services. Unfortunately, our website, intranet and various other smaller business systems were all operating on a variety of disparate legacy platforms, impeding our business objectives.

By engaging FiveP as a SharePoint specialist we were able to plan a controlled consolidation and content migration program of works which simplified our IT landscape considerably. FiveP quickly earned the respect of our own internal IT teams who were able to work alongside each other towards our common goals.

The resulting web CMS and collaboration platform has helped Mercy Health to optimise its internal communications network, supporting teams to understand each other and build stronger relationships. This has had direct and positive impact on team productivity and service to customers.

As a trusted advisor, FiveP supported us every step of the way to ensure it was a smooth transition. Providing support above and beyond expectations and enabling Mercy Health to meet its own project goals and time line.”

Dmitri Mirvis – Chief Information Officer – Mercy Health