Improved operational efficiencies for Healthscope with a central source of truth

Healthscope needed a legal matter management software that was easy and quick to adopt without having to worry cost (and "regret cost"), and was a ‘no-brainer’ in terms of operational efficiencies for the Legal Department.

Hospitals are change-averse environments and Richard Holbeach, General Counsel & Company Secretary at Healthscope was "happy to start very small and overcome one pain point first – to have a single, central source of truth that provided us all with better visibility over the work being done.”  

healthscope
Industry

Healthcare

Key results
  • Improved operational efficiency
  • Increased visibility
  • No IT department involvement required
  • Affordable matter management software
  • Data-driven, automated reporting

“No capex is eye-popping. In hospitals, the capital intensity of technology projects has held the industry back from achieving operational efficiencies. Xakia changes that approach and makes productivity for Legal Departments immediately achievable.”

Richard Holbeach
General Counsel & Company Secretary

Richard Holbeach - Healthscope

The situation at Healthscope

Healthscope is the largest national, privately owned network of hospitals in Australia, with 38 hospitals and treating over 65,000 patients every year.

The legal team at Healthscope manages a wide range of health patient, regulatory, commercial and procurement and employment legal issues. As with all hospitals and healthcare companies, the in-house Legal Department faces the multiple challenges of increased regulation, declining budgets and increased demand and experienced exponential growth in legal work throughout the COVID19 pandemic.

Richard Holbeach, General Counsel & Company Secretary, joined the Healthscope Legal Department in 2019, sits on the executive leadership team and reports directly to the CEO.

healthcare legal

Challenge

When Richard arrived at Healthscope, he instantly observed that the in-house Legal Department lacked a single source of truth to store and track its legal work, documents and emails. The incumbent system required such manual input that the team lost productivity with its use or worse, avoided using it altogether.

For each member of the team, there was lost time and productivity in simply looking for information to provide timely updates to business stakeholders or to inform next steps in any legal matter.

As a manager, Richard needed visibility over work. “Even the most simple things, like how much we are spending on law firms, or understanding what a piece of work was about was cumbersome,” Richard said. “Lack of information capture was frustrating everybody on the team and understanding the critical issues in the business was more difficult than it should have been.”

Approach

Hospitals are change-averse environments. Richard was acutely aware of the workflow and processes that had been in place for decades and was disinclined to make changes that would create angst amongst the team or its internal business stakeholders.

“I wanted a matter management solution that was easy and quick to adopt and was a ‘no-brainer’ in terms of operational efficiencies for the Legal Department,” Richard said. “I was happy to start very small and overcome the one pain point first – to have a single, central source of truth that provided us all with better visibility over the work being done.”

“The trial period was really important – I could actually have the team try the full functionality without even involving our IT department or spending any money, because it was web based and we could put non-confidential information in there.”

“Once we decided to hit go, it was so easy – we just had our IT department do a security assessment, that’s it. We didn’t even integrate Single Sign On or Outlook right away because our IT Department was so busy – it was the easiest software implementation I’ve done!”

Richard Holbeach
General Counsel & Company Secretary

legal matter management software

“The only additional cost was to “pre load” Xakia with all our existing matters which were in local folders on a drive and a complex Excel spreadsheet – so when our team logged on all our information was there ready to go.”

“Cost (and worrying about “regret cost”) was a huge factor for us,” Richard explained. “I was able to get the investment across the line so easily not only because it was affordable, but also because if it didn’t work, there were no lock-in contracts. Our 'at risk’ investment was just a few thousand dollars paid to have our matters pre-loaded to Xakia for us. Of course, my team were confident it would work because of the trial, but the “investment-lite” nature of Xakia made my CFO very happy.”

Richard explained. “No capex is eye-popping. In hospitals, the capital intensity of technology projects has held the industry back from achieving operational efficiencies. Xakia changes that approach and makes productivity for Legal Departments immediately achievable.”


Xakia is affordable. The pricing structure is easy to understand, and it scales as we add Legal Department team members NOT the business clients we service. It made the cost equation clear and the decision so easy.

Richard Holbeach
General Counsel & Company Secretary

legal analytics software

Results

Xakia's matter management software provides many operational efficiencies for the in house Legal Department at Healthscope.

A single source of truth to store and track their legal work, documents and emails

Today, Xakia's matter management system provides the legal team with a single, central source of truth, providing improved visibility across work for the Healthscope Legal Department.

“Xakia is the source of truth for all our legal work. That’s where our team come together and we can see what’s going on in real-time,” Richard explains. “In our industry, information capture is critical. In Xakia, we capture a clear description of the work that is being done, updates and notes. This feeds through to our reporting and handover notes and saves the team time every month. Each year I present to the CEO, CFO and CPO where we are spending our money – I show both the divisions incurring legal spend, as well as the areas of legal expertise we keep using. This informs our team design decisions.”

Helping the Healthscope legal team to incrementally improve its processes

Operational efficiencies for the Healthscope Legal Department don’t end there.

“One of the very best parts of Xakia,” Richard continues, “is the way our team continues to discover how it can incrementally improve its processes.”

Richard counts document automation, invoice and spend management, a contract repository and legal intake with the procurement, commercial and employment teams amongst some of the additional productivity wins the Legal Department have achieved over the past four years.


We started by trying to eliminate one horrendous pain point, and we just keep getting better and more efficient. And we haven’t had to do a major transformation to get there – just one small step at a time. Xakia makes it so easy.

Richard Holbeach
General Counsel & Company Secretary

healthscope

legal spend management software

Useful legal matter management resources

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Six Pain Points Hospitals & Healthcare Legal Departments Experience

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