Modernising Safety Reporting and Learning Across Tasmania’s Public Health System
Department of Health Tasmania
Introduction
The Department of Health Tasmania delivered a statewide modernisation of its Safety Reporting and Learning System (SRLS), transitioning from an outdated and inconsistent legacy system to a unified cloud-based solution. The new SRLS provides a single statewide solution for incident reporting, risk management, mortality review, consumer feedback, and quality improvement across all public health services.
Implemented across the entire Tasmanian public health system, the new platform offers consistent workflows, shared data structures, and statewide visibility of safety risks. The program focused on building strong governance and reporting foundations while supporting adoption across diverse services and sites.
Although optimisation continues, the modernised SRLS will improve data quality, strengthen oversight, and enable more reliable learning from incidents. These foundations support safer care delivery, regulatory alignment, and long-term systemwide improvement.
Challenge
The original SRLS, implemented in 2014, had become outdated, and increasingly difficult to maintain. Limited workflows, inconsistent data quality, and constrained analytics reduced its ability to support learning from incidents and safety governance. The platform no longer met modern clinical, regulatory or cloud-compliance requirements, and its support contract was nearing expiry.
As the statewide platform for incident management, risk oversight, consumer feedback, quality improvement and mortality reporting to Births Deaths and Marriages (BDM) and the Coroner’s Office, system limitations hindered visibility of risks and delayed timely analysis for frontline teams and executives.
Without modernisation, the legacy system would have continued to limit incident learning, mask statewide risks, and weaken oversight and monitoring processes. A contemporary, compliant and scalable platform that could support consistent and aggregated reporting was required to support sustainable safety learning aligned with national standards and policy requirements.
Approach
The Department of Health delivered a complex statewide transformation through procurement and implementation of a new cloud-based safety platform (DatixCloudIQ). The project involved clinical leaders, safety teams, digital health specialists, and system administrators working with the vendor partner.
Multiple modules were configured, including incidents, feedback, risks, mortality and quality improvement, supported by refreshed workflows and a simplified governance structure. A statewide Cloud Champion Network provides local expertise to support training, change management and adoption.
Implementation included staged deployment, comprehensive hypercare, and a hybrid support operating model to assist users during transition, alongside planning for decommissioning of the legacy system. The program deliberately prioritised strong foundations and consistent statewide processes, recognising that optimisation and maturity would continue to evolve over time.
Achievements / Outcomes
The project delivered a single statewide safety reporting platform now used across all Tasmanian public health services, achieving full organisational adoption. Cloud compliance has strengthened cybersecurity and operational resilience, while redesigned data structures will improve consistency and completeness of safety information.
Quality and safety teams report improved visibility of incidents and risks, reduced manual reporting effort, and emerging benefits from dashboards and analytics. Executives will now have an opportunity to have clearer statewide oversight of safety trends and governance activities.
The platform supports alignment with national standards and external review requirements, including mortality and reportable deaths processes. While system maturity continues to evolve, the modernised SRLS has already strengthened governance capability, data reliability and confidence in safety reporting, essential foundations for safer care across the health system.
Lessons for Others
• Prioritise statewide consistency early
• Build simplified and streamlined governance structures that include clinician oversight
• Use local champions, especially clinicians, to support adoption and credibility
• Engage clinicians early and often through co-design, testing and feedback loops
• Expect staged system maturity
• Align with regulatory standards
• Invest in data quality foundations, including clinician-led validation
• Plan legacy decommissioning early
