Southern District Health Board(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 39

Senior IS executive: Grant Taylor, regional CIO
Reports to: Regional CEO
Size of IS shop: 95

PCs: 2104
Mobile PCs: 210
Terminals: 498
Hand-held devices: 120
Total screens: 2932

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: HP; Windows XP, Vista
Server environment: HP, IBM, AIX, Linux, Tru64 Unix, Windows 2003, Dell
DBMS: Oracle, SQL
Address: Dunedin Hospital, 201 Great King St, Dunedin
Website: www.southerndhb.govt.nz
Key IS projects this year: Business intelligence; e-prescribing national pilot; integration — service oriented architecture; compliance with Public Records Act.

At the forefront of IT and general operations this year for the former Southern Alliance Information Group is the restructure that officially took place on 30 April, merging the Otago and Southland District Health Boards into one, under the new name Southern DHB. CIO Grant Taylor continues to lead IS operations for the merged entity. The merged DHB is already sharing a common financial system payroll, as well as multiple shared clinical systems. “We’ve been working under Southern Alliance toward this merger for two and a half years now,” he explains.

“There had been barriers in the way, but now getting the organisations aligned under one DHB will make things much easier.” The scope of the ICT budget is unlikely to change as a result of the merger.

Key projects include the rollout of a BI solution that will create a real-time data repository for all core DHB systems, as well as the launch of the national pilot e-prescribing electronic management system, with the aim to reduce the number of errors associated with medication prescriptions. Started in Q1 2010, the project is expected to reach completion in Q4 this year. Additionally, integration of service oriented architecture will allow and enable flow among primary care, Otago and Southland branches.

Ongoing document management work will also be completed to achieve compliance with the Public Records Act. Achievements since last year include a purpose-built, APC-fitted, datacentre that was completed in February and implementation of a new Patient Management System.