Medibank’s Dave Buckmaster on the importance of IT uptime

While staying with a friend in Canada, Dave Buckmaster noticed some Microsoft books on his friend’s shelves and decided to delve into them. After reading them he took the Microsoft exams, passed, and an IT career was born. He has held a range of IT jobs in Canada and the UK, including positions at Toyota, AMP and McDonald’s Canada.

Back in Australia, Buckmaster is now the Technology Services Manager for Medibank Health Solutions, which provides telephone triage, health advice and referrals for state and federal governments in Australia and New Zealand and has the largest remote workforce in the Asia Pacific region. He is responsible for technology and IT services and assessing new technology to assist the business.

These services, which are free to the public, take the pressure off hospitals and general practitioners (GPs). Buckmaster said, “During the swine flu pandemic, imagine if 2000 people had turned up to the same NZ hospital at the same time. Imagine the drain on hospital resources.”

With 700-800 registered nurses (RNs) plus around 100 GPs who work part-time, the equipment, connectivity and training required, so they can work from home, is key to the service. It’s all done using the phone and thin client technology.

Citrix’s online suite of products, including GoToMeeting and GoToTraining, enables the company to do inductions and training online.

“It’s expensive to fly people in for training,” Buckmaster said. The organisation was convinced to go with Citrix when “we were faced with having to fly 10 RNs to Wellington for two weeks’ training, which would have cost us a considerable amount. The money we saved by not having to fly nurses paid for the Citrix GoToMeeting solution for the Asia Pacific region.

“Collaboration tools are the very heart of the business. The system includes a record of the training so people can refer back to it, plus it now incorporates videoconferencing. It is definitely value for money.”

Medibank services must be available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Buckmaster, therefore, has to ensure that the technologies the company uses meet certain uptime criteria.

“It’s no good if we are down and there are people in need of immediate healthcare or medical advice. The responses and feedback from the general public is quite rewarding,” he said.

The challenges for Buckmaster are keeping everything operating, business continuity, disaster readiness, new business and bringing on new programs.

“As a technologist, I love what I do. It was a logical step to move into IT and I love the business engagement and communicating with business, so they can understand what the technology can do for business.

“Helping people with the simplest of technology tasks is a thrill. When we needed to refresh the thin client technology, I spent three weeks travelling around NZ installing thin clients for the RNs. It was good to see how their working environment worked and the nurses really appreciated an IT manager taking time to do it.

“When looking at technology trends, there are pros and cons of the cloud, and by extension, bring your own device (BYOD), which we are looking at. There is a large overload managing BYOD, and we also have to be mindful of security and having the right AV. We are currently a Blackberry user; however, we’re looking at expanding the devices we bring into our environment,” said Buckmaster.

Dave Buckmaster is the Technology Services Manager at Medibank Health Insurance, where he is responsible for delivering IT services to the business and managing the work-from-home program, serving the company’s 1500+ staff across Australia and New Zealand. Prior to joining Medibank Australia in 2006, he held senior IT roles at McDonald’s Canada and Toyota (GB) PLC in the UK, specialising in customer-focused IT service delivery and business engagement.