A collective of Victorian health services is to move most of their workloads and infrastructure to the cloud as part of a five-year transformation program.
Wangaratta, Victoria
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Fourteen public hospitals in the Hume region recently rolled out a new, consolidated patient administration system, which now forms the core of their technology stacks.
The completion of this milestone set the groundwork for the transformation’s next steps: completing the move onto Microsoft 365 and planning the migration off the health services’ legacy on-premises infrastructure.
The transformation is being overseen by the Hume Rural Health Alliance (HRHA), a shared IT services provider for the district extending from Goulburn Valley to the northeast border of Victoria.
According to the alliance’s CIO Neelu Kaur, a target of 80:20 in-cloud to on-premises has been set for the remaining three-and-a-half years of the roadmap.
“We definitely choose a cloud-first approach where the solutions are available for us to move to cloud,” she said.
“We use Microsoft [365], so it’s now [looking at] whether we can move to Azure or even software-as-a-service.”
Now that the alliance has almost completed the 14 providers’ move to M365, the next step will be to “standardise all intranets”, according to Kaur, ensuring everyone is onboarded to Teams and SharePoint.
As part of this, the alliance is planning to move all file servers to SharePoint.
“This will start to reduce our legacy environment,” Kaur said. “We’ll turn it off.
“[M365] has also given the team that capability of access anywhere, anytime. [They are] able to access their email, access their content on SharePoint on their devices.”
For core infrastructure, the alliance has recently completed a proof-of-concept and is now moving to the planning stage of migration.
Consolidated model
According to Kaur, the Hume health services’ technology roadmap was made possible by moving the 14 hospitals onto a consolidated operations model overseen by HRHA.
This has meant moving to a single, consolidated IT team supporting all the hospitals along with a community services provider.
In particular, the shared service model enabled the hospitals to easily move onto a single patient administration system (PAS), which replaced multiple different systems that had all largely reached end of life.
“The connected care [model] was what led us to having a single patient administration system and was also the start of a digital health roadmap,” Kaur said.
“It’s not sustainable for us to do things 14 times. We support public health services, there isn’t funding to do things 14 times [and] it’s not the best use of the funds as well.
“To be able to provide a sustainable and efficient solution, which also meets the objectives of what our health services are trying to deliver, the best outcome was to have a regional platform.”
The new patient administration system went live at the end of last year following three 24-hour migration days.
It now sits in a private cloud under the management of a branch within the Victorian Department of Health known as Health Technology Services.
Now with the core platform in place, Kaur’s other focuses include implementing an ’access and flow’ software platform for all 14 hospitals to improve bed management and transition to other health services.
The alliance is also carrying out a four-year project to deploy a universal electronic medical record to all the hospitals under its purview.
Over the years, the Victorian government has poured funding into implementing eMR systems across the state, adding a further $21.4 million last year.
However, according to Kaur, there remains “a big digital gap” between rural and regional Victoria compared to metropolitan areas.
“We’re working very closely with the department to see if we can get the required funding to put in the electronic medical record for our region,” she said.
“The beauty for us now is that we don’t need funding 14 times. We only need it once because of our core platform [the PAS].”
