healthAlliance(MIS100 2010)

By Jess Meyer | Thursday, May 27 2010

2009 ranking: 13

Senior IS executive: Phil Brimacombe, CIO
Reports to: CEOs of Waitemata and Counties Manukau DHBs and healthAlliance COO
Size of IS shop: 116

PCs: 5724
Mobile PCs: 660
Terminals: 1120
Hand-held devices: 390
Total screens: 7894

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: HP, Windows XP
Server environment: HP; Sun; IBM; Windows 2003, 2000, NT; AIX; Linux
DBMS: Oracle, SQL
Address: Middlemore Hospital, Otahuhu, Auckland
Website:www.healthalliance.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: E-Referrals; regional clinical documents repository; shared care plan to support primary care developments such as Integrated Family Health Centres; TestSafe pharmacy dispensing; Regional Mental Health Care plan integration (with non-government organisations and primary care); Medicines reconciliation; Oracle e-business suite upgrade; rostering and timesheet automation; regional datacentre; regional enterprise data storage; Counties radiology information system and x-ray images replacement.

There are numerous projects on the books for 2010, despite minor reductions in ICT spend, staffing and project allocation. IT will be used to help achieve business objectives for healthAlliance — Counties Manukau and Waitemata District Health Boards — by using a range of IT services to deliver critical and business applications that enable business initiatives.

According to Phil Brimacombe, CIO, the IS team will be working on a number of system projects including electronic referrals from GPs to hospitals; an e-shared care plan to support primary care developments, such as Integrated Family Health Centres; further development of the TestSafe clinical data repository to include pharmacy dispensing and clinical documents; regional mental health care plan integration with non-government organisations and primary care providers; and enhancements to electronic discharge summaries and electronic medicines reconciliation.

To improve efficiency and reduce costs for both the Manukau and Waitemata DHBs, implementation of rostering and timesheet automation will be undertaken, as well as upgrades to the Oracle E-Business suite and to the Altiris CRM system. Infrastructure projects include upgrades to datacentres and to data storage systems.

In response to the Ministerial Review Group (Horn Report) healthAlliance proposed providing regional and national shared services, including IT. “We anticipate that the National Health Board, Health IT Board and Shared Services Establishment Board will lead the rationalisation and standardisation of non-clinical services including IT.

It is possible that the healthAlliance structure and service model could be extended to include other DHBs, and that we will be providing IT services to a larger user base, including DHBs and possibly primary care organisations. In this event, we would significantly extend our IT application and infrastructure services,” explains Brimacombe.