26/05/2026
Celebrating 30 Years of CBS: 1996–2026
This month we celebrate 30 years of CBS – Health Costing Experts! Take a trip through the decades (and check out the embarrassing photos!) from humble beginnings in Hamilton, New Zealand with founders Ross Wilson and Alan Coburn, through to global leaders in Activity Based Costing and helping hospitals provide better healthcare to more people.
Where It All Began
CBS started in 1996 with our first client Waikato Hospital, where we worked on-site from the beginning and still visit once a week. With archaic modems and no remote access - if you needed data moved, you moved it yourself.
And that's exactly what we did. A big part of the month-end costing process was "cutting the tapes." Data from the Patient Management System was saved to a cassette tape (Google it, kids), loaded into a car, and driven up to Auckland for a mainframe engineer to load it onto the costing server. The mainframe itself occupied a space comparable in size to our current HQ (see photo), and hosting cost Waikato Hospital $1.4 million per year, charged by the second. That experience shaped a core CBS philosophy: key data should be accessible to all parties, at speed.
Building Something Better
At $1.4 million a year, the cost of running a mainframe costing system made a compelling case for building something of our own. In the late 1990s we moved to a cheaper server in Melbourne, cutting costs dramatically and transferring data via FTP.
By 2001 we had developed patient costing system CostPro, with its initial version written in Microsoft Access with a SQL back-end. Then in 2002, working with Lakes District, this server was replaced with a laptop and our own local servers, reducing the client's costs from $150,000 to just $16,000 per year.
Growth Across New Zealand
2005 to 2010 saw what we might call the Great New Zealand Battleground with CBS coming out as the victors with over 65% of hospitals selecting CostPro as their chosen patient costing system.
In 2005/06 we expanded into Data Warehousing, initially called CostProDW and now known as IntelPlus. The following year, we won the Health Innovation Awards. By 2010, CostPro had moved to a web application, making integration into clients' tech stacks far simpler.
FocusPro began life as a KPI tracker and over the years, developed into a robust reporting and analytics tool. In 2024, FocusPro played a key role in Barwon Health winning the HFMA Innovation Award.
Patient Billing: From ACC Invoices to ChargePro
In the late 2000s, we began supporting hospitals with ACC billing, starting with Waikato Hospital, Lakes DHB, and Tairawhiti. Over the following decade that work was refined and rebranded as ChargePro, a purpose-built patient billing platform now used across New Zealand and Australia. It handles ACC claims and purchase order management in New Zealand, and Medicare, Eclipse, and DVA billing across the Tasman, keeping billing accurate, compliant, and complete.
The real-world impact was immediate. At Lakes, automating ACC billing didn't replace staff; it freed them to find and fix revenue that had been slipping through the cracks. At Waikato, a simple daily query identifying surgery patients without ACC approval was recovering around $10,000 a week in revenue that had previously gone unnoticed. After implementation at Whanganui, back billing submitted to ACC from activity prior to go-live was over $1 million. District nursing, elective surgery, complicated billing rules that once lived in spreadsheets: ChargePro brought them all under one roof.
Going Global
In 2012, CBS made its first move into Australia, providing costing support for Syris Consulting. That relationship would come full circle in 2022 when CBS acquired Syris, with Simon Rush and the Syris team merging with CBS. 2017 saw the beginning of a close partnership with Barwon Health in Victoria. And after 20 years away from the company, Alan returned in 2019 and was a key figure in CBS partnering with new clients, Queensland Health with a statewide costing solution. That same year, CBS expanded into Abu Dhabi with the largest healthcare network in the UAE, SEHA (Abu Dhabi Health Services Co.).
The next 30
Thirty years ago, we were cutting tapes and driving data up the motorway. Today we're flying it through the cloud and shaping how healthcare organisations across the globe understand their costs, manage their billing, stop the bleeding, and make better decisions. The next thirty years start now.
