Auckland District Health Board(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 23

Senior IS executive: Johan Vendrig, CIO
Reports to: Garry Smith, CEO
Size of IS shop: 115

PCs: 5500
Mobile PCs: 400
Terminals: 330
Hand-held devices: 80
Total screens: 6310

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: HP, Windows XP
Server environment: HP; Windows 2003, 2008; Unix; Linux
DBMS: Oracle, SQL
Address: Building 10, Greenlane Clinical Centre, Greenlane, Auckland
Website: www.adhb.govt.nz
Key IS projects this year: IT resilience programme (virtualisation, blades and SANs); regional public health notifiable disease and contact management system; radiology orders and sign-off; regional electronic referrals; regional mental health information system.

ADHB maintains its focus on improving health outcomes for the population in its catchment area and maximising productivity with available health funding. Key challenges include managing the impact of the aging population and growth in the demand for acute care, while providing access for people to elective services and protecting a break-even budget position. “Collaboration between DHBs is an important aspect of what we do. Increasingly we will be sharing IT systems and will continue to develop shared, hosted solutions. It is likely that increasingly DHBs will move to some form of shared IT services,” says Johan Vendrig, CIO for the Auckland DHB.

The DHB will support the development of regional and national strategies, to move to shared electronic patient record solutions to allow patients, GPs and hospital clinicians to access shared clinical information and care plans. “At the same time clinicians become increasingly reliant on IT systems. So we are investing significantly to ensure appropriate uptime and resilience of our infrastructure and a large number of tier 1 (24x7) clinical applications. This will include investment in virtualisation, blade and SAN technology and application performance monitoring tools,” says Vendrig.

Important DHB initiatives for 2009, include primary and secondary-care integration, business intelligence, software and server virtualisation and knowledge management system investments.

The largest ICT projects in terms of cost are those around IT resilience (virtualisation, blade servers, SANs, and switching) and new health IT applications. Other investments include system upgrades to the Auckland DHB, core Clinical Records Information System, including radiology PACs and clinical workstations.