Canterbury District Health Board(MIS100 2010)

By CIO Staff | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 31

Senior IS executive: Chris Dever, CIO
Reports to: General manager — Corporate Services
Size of IS shop: 80

PCs: 4172
Mobile PCs: 756
Terminals: 339
Hand-held devices: 333
Total screens: 5600

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: HP, Windows XP
Server environment: HP; Windows 2003, 2008; Sun; Red Hat
DBMS: Oracle, SQL
Address: Level 4, Princess Margaret Hospital, Cashmere, Christchurch
Website: www.cdhb.govt.nz
Key IS projects this year: Not listed.

During 2009, Canterbury DHB largely focused on the rollout of front-line clinical systems and the removal of paper from the clinical interface. This allowed the implementation of systems to enable doctors to review and sign-off laboratory results on-line, and has removed the need for results to be printed, delivered to wards and subsequently filed.

Canterbury DHB has also been implementing new systems in its regional oncology service. Several new cancer treatment machines have been installed, which will reduce waiting times for cancer treatment. Implementation of this new hardware technology was the trigger to the implementation of associated computer hardware and software to support the new environment.

The DHB has had to review its telecoms contract with provider Telecom, following four major system outages of the as yet unreliable XT network. Some key clinical staff were switched to 2degrees SIM cards in February, to be used in their XT mobile phones, to ensure no loss of communication should another outage occur, while others were moved to Telecom’s old CDMA network. Primary clinical communications are maintained using a private paging network, which extends citywide. Chris Dever, CIO, says that he is confident that Telecom will get past these problems. Future purchases (in all areas) will align with government syndicated procurement processes.

Canterbury DHB makes extensive use of VoIP, with all inter-PBX traffic between the four city hospitals carried over the data network. VoIP phones (including hands-free phones from Vocera) are extensively used throughout the various campuses. The DHB is experimenting with the use of unified communications with a view to reducing travel costs across its widespread facilities.