The Royal Flying Doctor Service Central Operations (RFDS SA/NT) is a not-for-profit aeromedical organisation that delivers emergency retrievals, telehealth and comprehensive primary healthcare clinics to people living, working and travelling across South Australia and the Northern Territory.
For an organisation whose front-line teams depend on having the right procedure in the right hands at the right moment, one of RFDS SA/NT’s greatest strengths, the breadth of its clinical, aviation and corporate knowledge, had also become one of its hardest things to manage.
Critical documents were dispersed across SharePoint, Teams, network drives, OneDrive and legacy platforms, while search often surfaced duplicate, outdated or conflicting content. Version control was largely manual and inconsistently applied across systems. As a result, the organisation experienced:
To protect patient safety, governance compliance and operational reliability, RFDS SA/NT needed a single, trusted source of truth for its corporate, clinical and aviation knowledge.
RFDS SA/NT named the project PULSE, reflecting the intranet’s role as the organisation’s heartbeat and its connection to the broader health sector.
The organisation sought a secure, organisation-wide Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) to create a single source of organisational knowledge. The solution needed to improve document accessibility, search, governance, version control and lifecycle management for both online and offline users. Success would mean staff could quickly find critical information and trust that the document in front of them was the latest approved version.
PlanB partnered with RFDS SA/NT to decommission two legacy Intranets and deliver a single Electronic Document Management System, built on an enterprise-grade information architecture with automated metadata tagging.
The approach focused on more than replacing a search bar; it was about giving every doctor, nurse and pilot confidence that the document in front of them was current, accurate and easy to find.
The result was a more confident, better-governed way for staff to find and trust the knowledge they rely on every day.
By replacing fragmented systems with one trusted platform, RFDS SA/NT gave front-line teams faster access to the knowledge that keeps patients, pilots and communities safe.
The best knowledge platforms disappear into the background. They simply make sure the right person finds the right answer at the right time.
By replacing fragmented systems with one secure, searchable source of truth, RFDS SA/NT gave front-line teams the confidence that what they find is exactly what they need.
Reliable knowledge is not a nice-to-have. It’s part of the mission.
“PlanB took the time to understand the realities of running an aeromedical service across South Australia and the Northern Territory. The result is a platform calibrated to that reflects how our people actually work, both online and in the field and highlighted the true value of IT to RFDS staff across all our capabilities: Aviation, Health and Charity.”
