Medibank has signed up as the flagship adoptee of e5 Workflow’s new cloud-based workforce management platform, extending a longstanding partnership between the health insurer and the Sydney-based productivity software developer.

e5’s new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, known as ‘Connect’, effectively shifts its existing workforce management and optimisation platform from on-prem to cloud.

The popular platform, which according to e5 is used by 75 per cent of Australia’s healthcare insurance market, works by prioritising, distributing and monitoring workloads across an organisation, “sorting incoming work by priority level and then assigning it to the most suitable person”.

The shift of its services to cloud – the first change to its software base in 20 years – will, e5 said, enable it to improve external IT support and “preserve compliance”, boost security risk mitigation and provide the latest functionality and updates to the software.

Craig van Zeyl, founder and chief executive at e5 Workflow said the cloud upgrade offers “peace of mind for businesses knowing that they have the IT experts keeping their workflow management software current, secure and compliant in the face of ever-shifting regulatory guidelines across many of the industries we serve”.

Medibank said it also anticipates that the cloud-based e5 Connect will increase the speed and reliability of the software and reduce friction associated with running it on internal infrastructure, helping to obviate service outages and performance issues.

e5’s shift to cloud also aligns with Medibank’s own transition to cloud-first operations.

“Cloud-first is one of our core cloud principles – enabling a consistent computing approach and best practice across the enterprise – for any new services or when evaluating alternatives for existing services,” said Robert Bujaroski, IT applications manager for Medibank.

“[This is] one of the many reasons why we are implementing e5 Workflow’s industry-leading SaaS solution.”

Bujaroski added that the platform will enable the health insurer to “focus on value-adding activities and best-in-class customer service”.

e5 said it will also onboard Medibank subsidiary AHM to its cloud platform “over the coming months”.

The shift from e5’s on-prem to cloud offering extends a nearly 20-year partnership between Medibank and the workforce software developer.

Michael Norton, head of PHI operations at Medibank and ahm, said the platform has enabled the health insurer “to streamline our work processes, manage our SLAs [service-level agreements] and prioritise our operational activities”.

“Having e5 across operations has contributed to one of Medibank’s key focus areas – to deliver leading experiences for our customers and our people by: facilitating a seamless transition to work from home during Covid lockdowns; prioritising work to enable Medibank to provide leading customer experiences; eliminating waste in processes, enabling improved service level performance; and providing live visibility of work on hand and insightful reporting capabilities.”

van Zeyl said the Connect platform is the “result of six years of development and is the next iteration of how we can make our clients’ businesses more productive.”

E5 added that it will continue to support the on-premise version of its platform as it moves to onboard new and existing clients to e5 Connect.

Among e5’s other Australia-based clients include Allianz, AIA Health, HCF, nib, and IOOF.