When ICT project director Paul Gladwell joined the team to build Victoria’s Adeney Private Hospital in February 2023, he found it was a clean slate.
“They were just starting to dig the hospital foundations next to the site office. There was an IT Design Specification for the core infrastructure – the boxes, the cables, the networks, and a set of preferred applications – but that was it,” Mr Gladwell told Pulse+IT.
His job was to stand up a complete IT environment for a brand-new hospital.
Being a greenfield site “the positives are there’s no legacy tech, data, or people to deal with” he said.
“The negatives are there’s no tech, there’s no data, there’s no people, and there are no processes – it’s build everything from scratch.”
Adeney Private Hospital’s ICT success story, built on a solid foundation of innovation and collaboration, will be shared by Paul Gladwell when he takes the stage on Tuesday May 13 at Digital Health Festival, invited by one of the sub-contractors to talk about the value of partnerships and relationship building.
Adeney Private opened its doors on March 4, 2025, a joint venture between Amplar Health, backed by Medibank, and a team of medical professionals.
Looking back, Mr Gladwell credits the project’s success to a tight alignment of fantastic resources, mutual respect, and strong relationships.
“In the public health system, we’d spend 12 months just getting a project to the approval. stage,” he says. “At Adeney, we were reviewing and deciding next steps weekly. It was waterfall by design, but agile in delivery — tightly governed but fluid in operation”
32 IT projects
Mr Gladwell oversaw 32 IT projects with a tightly knit team. He leaned heavily on vendor partnerships—but not in the traditional sense.
“I couldn’t allocate a PM to every vendor, so our core vendors had to work together. Every fortnight, we’d meet, share updates, and resolve dependencies directly,” he says.
Relationship-building, he says, is what makes transformation sustainable.
“As a Project Director my role has to be someone who sits between IT, the technical people and the end users.
“In the lean, start-up type project that Adeney was, you do everything and anything the project requires at a given time – reviewing and re-designing strategy to move from what was initially defined as a fully on-premises solution to a mixture of SaaS, hosted, and on-premises infrastructure.
“As with any program of this size, there were curveballs and challenges, but having a small group with everyone focused on the same outcome gave us a great opportunity to move quickly.
“We had to have a good strategy to work from. And we had to have a vision from a people and process perspective that technology could enable as we moved forward,” he said.
Tight timeframes
“Despite the tight timeframes we also wanted to look for innovations that would benefit the hospital workforce – think bimodal approach – where you focus 80 per cent of your effort on the day-to-day and 20 per cent on the value add.
“For example, our connections to Enterprise Ireland presented MEG IT to us – MEG is a Quality, Risk, Incident and Document Management system rolled into one. Web, or app-based on the military-spec Samsung handsets, nurses can communicate, collect quality data and report incidents on the fly,” he said.
However the standout implementation was the rollout of the Dedalus WebPAS system.
“We signed in October, had infrastructure stood up in November, installed in December, tested in January, and went live by February. For a vendor of that scale, that’s fast,” Mr Gladwell said.
Adeney Private’s 60-bed facility aims to prioritise operational efficiency and patient experience, with patient flow from pre-admission to discharge being a central focus.
Dedalus webPAS covers admissions, discharges, billing, revenue management, patient notifications, and proven interfaces for general ledger and coding solutions.
- “Selecting a Trusted IT Partner” with Paul Gladwell, Tuesday May 13, at 3.30pm Intel Theatre, Digital Health Festival 2025.
