Eleanor AshfordChief Technology Officer

Executive summary / Personal profile

Holding less, and paying when systems fail

Portrait of Eleanor Ashford

Chief Technology Officer Australia

I want a member's claim paid on a difficult day, and their details absent from records the fund never needed.

Open to Board appointments · Advisory roles

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01 / Leadership approach

Members judge a health fund at the counter, usually when they are unwell or worried about a bill. I would rather offer them a slower service that works when part of our technology fails than a faster one that simply stops. I also believe that every record we keep about a person must earn its place, because a stored record cannot be stolen once it has been destroyed.

02 / Areas of responsibility

  • Point-of-service and hospital claims platforms
  • Breach rehearsal and notification readiness
  • Data minimisation and retention
  • Operational resilience with service providers
  • Supervised use of AI
Premium revenue
A$688M
Year ended June 2026
People covered
310,000
About 165,000 hospital and extras policies
Technology staff and contractors
137
104 employees and 33 contractors

Evidence from practice

Removing identity details the fund had no reason to keep
In early 2023 I commissioned an inventory of the personal information held across our systems.
Choosing a degraded mode for extras claiming, then living through an outage
In 2024, preparing for APRA's operational risk management standard, we named point-of-service extras claiming and hospital eligibility checks as two of our critical operations.
Keeping a cover-question assistant with our consultants
Our contact centre answers about 290,000 calls a year, and roughly a third ask whether a treatment is covered.
The complete case record ↗

A health fund's technology should keep paying members when one of its parts fails, while holding no more of their information than the fund can justify.

I am chief technology officer of Corrabeen Health, a member-owned, not-for-profit private health insurer based in Adelaide. About 165,000 policies cover 310,000 people, mainly in South Australia, Victoria and the Northern Territory, and premium revenue for the year ended June 2026 was A$688 million. I lead 104 technology employees and 33 contractors through six managers, with a budget this year of A$41 million, of which A$12 million is capital. Benefit rules, product design and premiums belong to their accountable executives. I answer for the systems that carry those decisions to members, practices and hospitals, and for the security of what those systems hold.

I began in 1997 writing claims code for small health funds, then spent sixteen years in home insurance and workers' compensation before returning to this sector in 2016. That route gave me two habits. The first is to ask what a member experiences in the hour after a system fails, not only how quickly it recovers. The second arrived later and less comfortably. After the large attacks on Australian organisations in late 2022, I saw that much of what we stored about former members served no current purpose and represented risk we had chosen to keep.

Three decisions on this site show those habits at work. We removed identity and bank details for half a million people who had left the fund years earlier. We accepted a degraded mode for extras claiming instead of duplicating the whole claims engine, and a real outage then tested it. We placed a cover-question assistant with our own consultants before considering any version for members. Each choice cost something that colleagues valued, and I set those costs beside the results.

Former-member records cut back

Identity records for 512,000 people who left more than seven years earlier were reduced to a minimal cover history. Their Medicare numbers, bank details and claims detail were deleted, at a cost of A$1.6 million.

A slower service that stayed open

When the claims engine failed for seven hours and forty minutes in March 2026, a separate eligibility service answered 410 hospital checks while about 4,900 extras transactions moved to pay now and claim later.

Consultants first, members later

A supervised assistant cut handling time for cover questions from 8.9 to 7.4 minutes. Material errors fell from 4.1 to 1.2 per cent after we restructured product rules. No member-facing version has been released.

Current focus

I am preparing our systems and member notices for the Privacy Act's new transparency requirements on automated decisions, due to commence in December 2026, and finding the places where software already shapes a decision about a member without anyone having described it that way.

Conversations I welcome

I would welcome a first non-executive role on the risk, audit or technology committee of a customer-owned or not-for-profit organisation outside private health insurance, with twenty-two days a year available, subject to my employer's consent and a review of conflicts.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

In the boardroom

  • Wattlegrove Community HousingExternal member of the finance, audit and risk committee; not a director · 2023–present

Formation

  • Bachelor of Computer ScienceTellebrook University · 1996
Eleanor tells our board how the systems would fail before she tells them what she wants to buy. When the claims engine stopped last March, the fallback she had argued for was running before most of the executive team knew there was a problem.
Callum BrodwickChief executive, Corrabeen Health
The full record ↗

Contact

I would welcome a first non-executive role on the risk, audit or technology committee of a customer-owned or not-for-profit organisation outside private health insurance, with twenty-two days a year available, subject to my employer's consent and a review of conflicts.

  • Board appointments
  • Advisory roles
Write to Eleanor Contact page