How Better Health Network completed a tri-party merger with monday.com

Better Health Network (or BHN) is a not-for-profit organisation that provides a wide range of services to support healthy living, wellbeing and social connection, including specialist medical services, dental and allied health, GPs, nursing, counselling services, as well as aged care and disability services to communities across inner south and south-eastern Melbourne.

BHN was faced with the challenge of combining three community health organisations into one holistic entity. The merger of three distinct organisations into one entity presented significant hurdles, primarily in terms of collaboration and data management.

"We came together, and we didn't know each other," remarks Samantha O'Brien, Director of Business Intelligence and Systems. "So the challenge was about bringing three organizations into one."

The newly formed Better Health Network needed a platform that could:

• Integrate and streamline workflows from three different post-merger integration work .
• Provide clear visibility and transparency across all operations.
• Enable easy access to real-time data for all team members.
• Facilitate the management of multiple workstreams.

Amrita Ahluwalia, Executive Director of Transformation at BHN, stressed the importance of visibility and collaboration as key enablers of the process: "We needed a platform that would provide us a single source of truth. So, at any given time, we knew exactly what was occurring on every team.

For BHN to function as one entity, the teams needed the ability to manage the 15 integration workstreams they had in one central place with full visibility to all. As Project Manager Nicole Redward puts it, "When it comes to merging three organisations together, collaboration is extremely important and knowledge is power. It's that knowledge that came through complete visibility into every workstream that allowed BHN to maximise their resources and function as one entity.

The 15 workstreams were varied, spread across every part of the organisation from corporate services to service delivery. "We managed the 15 workstreams using monday.com, and this provided us with the visibility and transparency we needed across the organisation, says Nicole "

But what really enabled the team at BHN to get their workstreams up and running quickly was the intuitive use of the platform. As Samantha says, "one of the benefits of monday.com was that it was very easy to use in terms of its development. We could do that, in-house, with ease."

It was critical for BHN to have a robust platform that could not only manage workstreams but also measure their efficacy. monday.com emerged as the solution that could bring together the disparate elements of the 15 workstreams, allowing for precise measurement and management and boosting efficiency along the way.

"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it," says Amrita, quoting the famous adage by Peter Drucker. "We needed a solution through our integration journey that would bring all the work of the 15 workstreams together for us to accurately measure what we were doing. She also explains the importance of presenting accurate data to leadership: "monday.com also gives me the confidence that what we were reporting to the board is accurate".

By leveraging the precise data collection that monday.com provided, Better Health Network ensured that every decision, risk, and action was meticulously documented and aligned with its strategic goals, demonstrating the platform's critical role in the successful merger of the three organisations.

Samantha explains how, by using monday.com, BHN successfully merged three separate entities into one holistic organization, leading the way to substantial improvements in operational efficiency and collaboration, even with limited resources: "It's crucial to health and non for profits to make sure we're sustainable into the future where money is short and tight and monday.com provided that lean approach for us."

This point is made even more clear by Amrita when she speaks about how automations within the platform save incredible amounts of time spent on administrative work: "We have achieved a return on investment of two times our investment in monday.com – and this is based only on the valuation of automations used on the platform."

"I can't believe we've successfully implemented this merger with our people who had no prior merger experience and without using any merger consultants," Amrita says – a testament to the strategic importance of monday.com to BHN throughout the entire process.