Governance

Our Advisory Board comprises of 7 members with NSW Health system, IT and private sector experience. They are responsible for providing strategic oversight to the financial and operational performance of eHealth NSW; advising on business strategies to support greater efficiency and customer service; and ensuring we use robust internal reporting, corporate governance and risk management frameworks and processes.

The NSW Health Digital Health Strategy Oversight Committee (DHSOC) is responsible for setting digital health strategy, advising on digital health policies and standards and ensuring effective digital health project and program delivery across NSW Health. The DHSOC is chaired by Susan Pearce, Secretary, NSW Health, and the membership is comprised of senior leaders from across the system, including NSW Health, local health districts, pillars and specialty networks.

The role of a steering committee is to ensure the success of a program or project through effective governance, so that it can deliver the outcomes and benefits specified in the business case.

An eHealth NSW steering committee ensures

• Review and approval/rejection of deliverables and key management artefacts.
• Resolution of cost, time, risk, resource, safety and quality, operational impact and scope issues escalated to the Committee.
• Progress against approved business case, plans, budgets and delegations.
• All changes are assessed and approved for impact to time, budget, scope, safety and quality, operational impact, risk and benefits.
• Approve or reject changes, use of contingency and program/project closure.

Other responsibilities for a steering committee include;

Cross-functional leadership and direction

• Provide clear and consistent direction on vision, scope and requirements.
• Review strategy to ensure consistency with Ministry of Health, LHDs and other applicable NSW government directives and strategies.
• Monitor business, strategic issues and initiatives to provide advice to the day-to-day team on those that may present a risk or have impact on the rationale or success of the program/project.
• Ensure provision of resources for planning and delivery.
• Actively and overtly support the program/project and act as an advocate for its outcomes.
• Ensure funding is continuous if the program/project spans financial years.
• Establish specialty streams as required under the leadership of a nominated Committee member, in order to further investigate a particular topic area and report findings to the Committee.
• Recommend any changes that may be required within the program/project.

Maximise Benefits

• Establish how benefits will be defined and measured.
• Review, approve or reject benefits management plans.
• Monitor progress against approved benefits management plans.
• Liaise with benefit owners to support the realisation of benefits.
• Monitor realisation of benefits while the program/project is in flight and report to senior executive and governance bodies as required.
• Make decisions in line with clinical and business objectives and ensure the program/project ultimately delivers the benefits, as outlined in the business case.

The role of a design working group (DWG) is to help eHealth NSW design safe, useful, usable and used digital clinical solutions.

An eHealth NSW DWG ensures

• that design decisions are made by the best possible team of clinicians and other health staff
• the group has the delegated authority to make clinical solution design decisions from the user perspective within a defined scope
• all digital clinical solutions are consistently developed using appropriate, evidence-based human-centred design methods.

DWGs operate within the Clinical Solutions Design Governance (CSDG) framework, which governs the design of all digital clinical solutions built by eHealth NSW.

Each DWG must have a clear senior business owner and include members representing six pre-determined knowledge domains in the design process.