RFDS builds a life-saving IT architecture on Oracle Autonomous Database

Royal Flying Doctor Service delivers essential healthcare in rural Australia by replicating data to Oracle Autonomous Database using OCI GoldenGate.

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Our mission is to provide healthcare to every corner of Australia. One of the key challenges in the outback is internet connectivity. What Oracle Autonomous Database provided is the ability to operate offline, and when internet was available, it would automatically stream the services back through again.

Ryan KloseChief Information Officer, Royal Flying Doctor Service

Business challenges

Imagine being a healthcare worker and not having access to information that could help save the life of your patient. Whereas most healthcare workers take real-time access to critical information systems for granted, the staff of Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) delivers primary healthcare and 24-hour emergency services to the underserved population in Australia’s remote regions, which include up to 70% of the country and where reliable internet connectivity is often not available. As one of the largest aeromedical organizations in the world, RFDS logs over 380,000 patient interactions per year, operates 80 aircraft, and maintains more than 300 road-based ambulances.

With RFDS tending to a patient on average every two minutes, the high demand for services called for a better system to handle patient data. Historically, RFDS staff recorded patient interactions on paper forms, with up to 600 fields per interaction. Information on those forms was manually entered into either standalone applications or shared via CSV files among 100-plus databases across seven operating entities. During interactions in remote areas with little or no internet connectivity, staff often could not access the RFDS knowledgebase of patient data. These disparate systems and connectivity issues challenged the organization’s ability to deliver the highest-quality services to its patients. And, as a nonprofit organization, the requisite web of service agreements and support services resulted in unacceptably high support costs.

Accordingly, RFDS evaluated enterprise-grade cloud solutions with the goal of establishing a countrywide patient record system that could facilitate the sharing of consistent, reliable, and accurate information in real time across operations. Ultimately, this new framework would help employees to analyze health and services patterns to improve patient outcomes.

We chose Oracle Autonomous Database for speed, accessibility, and the ability to power all our data on one platform and have that data immediately at the time we need to use it.

Ryan KloseChief Information Officer, Royal Flying Doctor Service

Why RFDS chose Oracle

RFDS evaluated cloud platforms offered by AWS, Azure, and Oracle. Of paramount importance was a partner with a track record in helping organizations reduce costs through standardization and automation. Ideally, products and services would be engineered together in a system architecture that would solve RFDS’s remote connectivity challenges, allow for secure and consolidated data, and enhance data analysis to improve patient outcomes. With this architecture in place, IT staff could transition from maintenance activities to higher-value roles as technology innovators in support of the organization’s quest to not just modernize systems but to also become a digital leader in healthcare.

Based on these criteria, RFDS selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as the ideal solution for building an innovative, enterprisewide healthcare technology architecture. Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads (ATP) and OCI GoldenGate would allow for replication of data from multiple sources within RFDS. As a real-time data mesh platform, OCI GoldenGate’s replication capabilities would help ensure that data captured offline was reliably synchronized with other healthcare systems when connectivity was restored. These OCI capabilities, along with a proven commitment to the healthcare industry, demonstrated to RFDS’s leadership that Oracle was the best choice.

RFDS gave clinicians about 30% more time to spend on face-to-face patient care by using electronic health records.

Results

With its aeromedical electronic health records system on one technology stack, RFDS teams synchronize service delivery more efficiently across seven operating entities. For example, a nurse and doctor in flight can access potentially life-saving medical information on a tablet while transporting a critically injured rancher to emergency facilities hundreds of miles away. Healthcare providers can also analyze patient records and use predictive diagnostics as they build trust in communities in the Outback with long-term and complex health issues. In a real-life scenario, a patient whose car rolled over multiple times on the highway was able to have information on his condition shared with the hospital and ground crew ahead of his arrival. “The patient spoke of not only the lifesaving doctor and nurse on the scene, but also about the technology,” Klose says. “The treatment was more precise, leading to a lot better health outcome for that person. We saw him dispatched from the hospital under five days after such a horrific accident." 

RFDS reduced by 30% the time spent on administrative work by moving from paper to electronic records running on OCI and Autonomous Database. RFDS captures all patient interactions electronically within Oracle Autonomous Database, virtually eliminating paper forms. For interactions entered in offline mode, OCI GoldenGate automatically updates and synchronizes data with Oracle Database in just seconds when connectivity is restored. As a result, RFDS has a fault-tolerant and zero data-loss architecture that modernized operations into a real-time data mesh platform.

In addition to real-time patient care data, RFDS also tracks patient outcome data that charts how a person fared after moving from RFDS care to a hospital. By using OCI and Oracle Autonomous Database, it reduced the time it takes to process that patient-outcome data from hospitals from hours to minutes. Oracle Autonomous Database delivered this improvement because it automatically adjusts to varying workloads, adding capacity as needed to address surges in demand. Data about patient health and outcomes is critical for researchers from RFDS and other organizations looking to improve emergency care and overall health in remote areas, where life expectancy is notably lower than in Australia overall.

Published:February 15, 2025

About the customer

Boosted by a vast number of volunteers and supporters, the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) provides a lifeline for people who live, work, and travel in a rural and remote Australia. The organization has been operating for more than nine decades.

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