NSW Health continues cloud shift with $160m AWS renewal

NSW Health has renewed its public cloud infrastructure deal with Amazon Web Services for another three years.

The $159.6 million contract was signed via the federal government’s AWS procurement agreement and forms part of NSW Health’s multi-cloud strategy, which also incorporates Microsoft Azure.

The department currently uses cloud infrastructure to support several critical systems within NSW Health, including electronic medical records (eMR), its enterprise data lake, contact centres and stroke patient service, Telestroke.

The upcoming single digital patient record is also hosted on AWS under a separate 10-year contract worth $163 million that was signed last year.

“By adopting cloud technologies, NSW Health is accelerating innovation, modernising service delivery, and improving outcomes for patients and clinicians while keeping information safe and secure,” an eHealth NSW spokesperson said.

“NSW Health’s cloud transition aligns with the NSW government cloud strategy… and is pivotal to NSW Health’s digital transformation.”

In its latest annual report [pdf], NSW Health highlighted progress on its cloud modernisation program, noting that more than 20 systems, including electronic medical records and intensive care records, had been onboarded to its AWS-hosted enterprise data platform.

Seven instances of the agency’s iPharmacy service, which provides pharmacists with patients’ prescriptions and medical histories, were also consolidated into a single state-hosted cloud environment.

eHealth NSW, the agency responsible for digital health services, also revealed that it had migrated 60 percent of its critical business applications to the public cloud.

Meanwhile, NSW Health’s statewide data centre reform program, which supports health organisations moving from locally hosted, on-premises infrastructure to the department’s cloud platform, reported that 87 percent of targeted applications and 83 percent of infrastructure successfully migrated.