BUSINESS CHALLENGE

The client, a public health system relied on a consistent and safe approach to prescribing medicines across hospitals. However, the current environment consisted of over 30 separate hospital formularies, each independently maintained by Local Health Districts (LHDs). This fragmentation made it difficult to ensure statewide compliance with evidence-based prescribing practices.

As mandated by the Health Policy Directive PD2016_033, every public hospital must maintain its own formulary, and updates must undergo rigorous evaluation by Drugs and Therapeutics Committees (DTCs). But with no unified source of truth, clinicians faced discrepancies in medicine details, duplicated efforts, outdated information, and safety risks due to misalignment across systems.

In parallel, the Hospital Pharmacy Product List (HPPL) — the centralised list of all pharmaceutical products used, needed to be consistently synchronised with the statewide dispensing platform (i.Pharmacy). With hospitals relying on the HPPL for accurate dispensing, even small errors or missing details could disrupt medicine supply and impact patient safety.

The Ministry of Health and Clinical Excellence Commission identified an urgent need to create a consolidated, statewide formulary solution that delivered uniformity, transparency, accuracy, and real-time updates while ensuring integration with the HPPL. The challenge demanded strong technical ownership, constant coordination with infrastructure, cloud, security, and release teams, and a commitment to quality through systematic testing and automation.

STRATEGIC SOLUTION

Adactin played a central role in delivering a statewide, unified formulary and HPPL solution, adopting a hybrid delivery methodology combining Agile sprints with Waterfall governance elements to ensure predictable releases and stakeholder alignment.

The focus was on building a single source of truth for all medicines used across public hospitals, ensuring the data was accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible for dispensing, prescribing, and decision-making. The solution required rigorous planning, continuous testing, frequent stakeholder engagement, and structured automation to maintain quality across multiple releases.

Adactin established a strong delivery rhythm through:

• Two-week sprints for development,
• Fortnightly production releases,
• Continuous defect management and requirements mapping, and
• Daily stand-ups to manage priorities and blockers.

Beyond coordination, Adactin took ownership of the full testing lifecycle for the State Formulary and HPPL. This included preparing and maintaining SIT test cases in Azure DevOps, identifying high-severity defects, raising improvement opportunities, and ensuring every enhancement or bug fix was thoroughly validated before release.

A significant achievement was building an automated regression suite using the Karate tool, reducing manual effort from 40 hours to just 2 hours. This automation not only accelerated delivery but ensured reliability across modules with every sprint and release.

Adactin also led reporting improvements by constructing Azure DevOps dashboards as a single repository for real-time visibility of SIT and regression progress — replacing manual Excel tracking. Additionally, new naming conventions and test structuring strategies were introduced to keep regression test suites clean, scalable, and easy to maintain.

Adactin’s role extended beyond delivery into coaching and enablement. The team provided POCs, mentored associates, supported ServiceNow Test Management 2.0 adoption, and worked closely with State Formulary and HPPL teams to streamline operations and foster a high-performance culture.

BUSINESS OUTCOMES

The unified formulary and HPPL program delivered strong operational, clinical, and governance benefits:

Quality, Safety & Compliance

• A consolidated statewide formulary ensured alignment with government health policy mandates.
• Enhanced accuracy and consistency of medicine listings across all hospitals.
• Improved adherence to regulatory and clinical governance requirements.

Operational Efficiency & Delivery Performance

• 83+ regression scenarios automated, reducing manual regression from 40 hours to 2 hours.
• Faster, reliable release cycles through fortnightly production updates.
• Elimination of duplicate test cases and improved regression suite manageability.
• Real-time tracking through Azure DevOps dashboards enhanced reporting transparency.

DEFECT SUMMARY

• Strengthened collaboration across developers, architects, testers, analysts, and release teams.
• Higher defect discovery rate (especially in HPPL+ and State Formulary), leading to improved system stability.
• Positive recognition from solution designers for setting high standards in test design and defect quality.
• Improved learning curve and confidence in using ServiceNow Test Management 2.0.

Collectively, these enhancements enabled the client to maintain a robust statewide formulary and HPPL platform, ensuring safer medicine use, faster releases, and improved user confidence in the system.

References

Technologies: Azure DevOps, ServiceNow, MS SQL Server, Karate Automation Framework