Everyone is staying schtum about the very sudden departure of the practice management software giant’s iconic chief product officer Danielle Bancroft.
Health Services Daily has learned that major software industry technology leader Danielle Bancroft – the person who guided the development of the country’s dominant GP patient management product for the past four years – has departed the company suddenly.
Ms Bancroft is among the top five medical software EHR platform technologists in the country, having been a lead on the development of the highly successful eScript project – probably the most successful national interoperability project in Australia to date – and then for the last four years as the front person and architect for the country’s largest GP patient management platform, Best Practice.
Ms Bancroft, who as well as being a technology leader was still a practising pharmacist, was happily extolling the virtues of the company’s latest big initiative – Journey to the Cloud – less than a week ago on the weekly industry practice management podcast MediCubes, and was front and centre for the company on stage at the Digital Health Festival in Melbourne on 14 May.
She spoke to HSD for nearly an hour about Best Practice’s new iterative cloud strategy on that day with enthusiasm and guile, showing no signs whatsoever that within nine days she would no longer be working for the company.
All indications are that Ms Bancroft did not resign to go to another job or even that she knew late last week or the beginning of this week that she would be leaving the company.
HSD understands she contacted Halo Connect yesterday to inform that group that she would be stepping down from its board.
Best Practice is a major shareholder in Halo Connect and Ms Bancroft has been integral to the development of this major middleware product which is able to connect Best Practice’s older core on-premise cloud instances to the cloud via FHIR interfaces, a major step for the group to meet the upcoming requirements from the government for all the major software platform vendors to be able to share data in real time via the cloud.
She was due to participate this weekend at the RACGP’s Practice Owners Conference in Melbourne on behalf of the company.
HSD has contacted several senior industry figures, some of whom have been informed of what happened, but no one was prepared to comment at this stage.
HSD contacted both Ms Bancroft and BP CEO Craig Hodges for comment. By the time we went to press Mr Hodges got back to us with the following statement:
“Best Practice Software confirms that Danielle Bancroft left the business this week. Best Practice has thanked Danielle for her contributions and wished her all the very best for a bright and successful future ahead.”
Prior to Ms Bancroft arriving at Best Practice nearly four years ago the group had struggled significantly with developing a cloud version of their market-leading BP Premiere product.
A cloud version called Titanium was promised by the group some five years ago to its customers but it never eventuated after it ran into a series of issues in development. But this was probably fortuitous for the group as five years ago GPs and government regulators were not ready to adopt the cloud and internet infrastructure was still too fragile to deliver such a rich application over the internet.
Ms Bancroft leaves behind a legacy of developing out a new iterative journey for the group to the cloud which included the development of an FHIR-based interoperability layer that can talk to the core on-premise code base (this code base is also hosted in some instances in the cloud by some corporates) that allowed the product to give its customers a taste of the cloud without having to move in one hit to a full cloud PMS application.
She has also been integral to the Sparked program which has mapped out a standardised clinical coding framework that every vendor can use with FHIR and will form the basis of most software EHR vendors being able to share data in real time in a standard form, and has contributed to countless government investigations into how best medical software can evolve to transform interoperability in healthcare data across the health system.
Most recently she was deeply embedded in a project to integrate Best Practice with Cerner/Oracle, one of our two major hospital EMRs, an initiative which was looking to bridge the significant gap between hospital and GP interoperability.