A critical aspect of the National Blood Authority’s work - collaborating across all Australian governments to manage and coordinate an adequate, safe and affordable supply of blood and blood products and services - has become significantly easier thanks to an innovative and secure private workspace provided via Objective Connect.

As a statutory agency within the Australian Government Health portfolio, the National Blood Authority (NBA) must guarantee that strict information governance protocols are adhered to whenever sensitive health information is exchanged between state, territory and Australian Government agencies.

“Working across nine governments and over 400 hospitals, sharing information and collaborating with external parties in a secure and auditable way can be a nightmare,” said Peter O’Halloran, Executive Director and Chief Information Officer of the NBA.

“Internally we had created a sound information governance framework that was controlled and compliant with legislation, government policy and best practice. However, as soon as we shared information with someone outside the building we’d lose all of that transparency and traceability in an instant,” said Peter.

Objective Connect is now used across the NBA whenever there’s a need to work with anyone outside the organisation. Committee Papers, tender evaluations, benchmarking data, expert panel reviews and even source-code from ICT systems developed by the NBA is all now securely shared using Objective Connect.

“There was no other option. We wanted something that would integrate into HP TRIM, gave us the full audit trails and that was IRAP assessed. Objective Connect was the only product that hit all those marks.” Said Peter O’Halloran.

Rob Mills, Global VP of Objective Connect says: “While the public sector and industries such as healthcare and financial services want to work more collaboratively with others outside their own tightly controlled environments their key challenge is doing that in a way that does not break information governance rules.

“Objective Connect is a cloud collaboration platform that solves that by working as an extension of the existing “back office” of government and therefore applying the same set of document lifecycle and security management controls as are deployed inside the agency.

“In addition, it integrates with many popular electronic document management systems (EDMS) used by regulated industries meaning that the EDMS becomes the ‘single source of truth’ for documents regardless of where or why they are being accessed.” said Rob Mills.

To download a detailed case study of how NBA is maintaining their information governance, whilst addressing the collaboration imperative, click here