National system manages 93 percent financial transactions in Te Whatu Ora

eHealthNews.nz: National Systems & Strategy

National system manages 93 percent financial transactions in Te Whatu Ora

Wednesday, 11 October 2023

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NEWS - eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

A national information system and modern analytics tools have enabled consolidated financial reporting for New Zealand’s largest single organisation – Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand.

Te Whatu Ora has a workforce of 90,000 and annual turnover of $26.4 billion, with 93 percent of transactions now going through the national Finance Procurement Information Management (FPIM) system.

When Te Whatu Ora was created in July 2022 it amalgamated 29 different entities (20 were District Health Boards) and these had a huge amount of variation around business processes, practices, charts of accounts, and codes.

On day one, 41 percent of data was flowing through FPIM. This has now hit 93 percent, with Hawke’s Bay the latest district to go-live over the weekend of September 30, and three more districts left to go before June 2024.

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Brent Harvey, head of reporting, costing and standards, says what the Te Whatu Ora finance team has achieved over the past year is “remarkable”.

“This was the largest public sector amalgamation in history with 12,500 unique cost centres to map and hundreds of thousands of codes that needed to be uniformly mapped and migrated,” he says

“We were able to report financially from day one on the consolidated financials for the new entity.”

Harvey says FPIM means they are now able to deliver banking, tax, finance, audit, and formal structures to the two new national entities, Te Whatu Ora and Te Aka Whai Ora.

“By coordinating that level of complex information in one place, we have formed one version of the truth that we can report against and created a really solid, infrastructural backbone for what we do in finance,” he explains.

“We are using that sound infrastructure and applying it to the new ways of working, such as national collaboration: we can now have great Kiwis in Northland working on a problem in Southern.

“It’s also providing really powerful fast data and has created huge efficiencies: we have removed six days of process from every month of work in terms of consolidation,” Harvey says.

FPIM was previously called the National Oracle Solution (NOS): it had been intended to replace the finance systems at all 20 former DHBs, but problems with the programme meant this was scaled back to just 10, with rollouts required to be at minimum three-month intervals.

Jakkie van Wyk, head, FPIM implementation and data, says successful implementations have built momentum and the system is now being rolled out to all operating units (districts and shared services agencies).

FPIM has been rolled out to districts monthly this year, reusing expertise and lessons learned along the way.

“We have brought over half the sector onto a single system in less than a year. I would never say it is simple, but we are learning and moving much faster than the original business case predicted,” she says.

van Wyk says having the national system is place provides national level visibility for procurement and supply chain and enables more streamlined decision making when it comes to things like purchasing.

Te Whatu Ora chief finance officer Rosalie Percival recently won CFO of the year in recognition of what the national Te Whatu Ora finance team has achieved.