Cloud technology is delivering greater speed and reliability for information technology (IT) and clinical services right across NSW Health.
In its first 12 months the Infrastructure Refresh Program has saved 120,000 clinical productivity hours by transitioning eHealth NSW services to the cloud.
This included a 70% reduction in unplanned outages and a 50% reduction in maintenance windows.
As at May 2023, 30% of eHealth NSW services have been migrated and 90% of critical applications are planned for cloud migration by the end of 2024.
The program has saved $25 million in total over the past year in avoided costs, reduction in capital expenditure and improvements in productivity.
Meanwhile eHealth NSW’s Statewide Data Centre Reform Program is working with health organisations across the state to migrate their locally managed services to the cloud.
Improved productivity
The program has achieved $70 million worth of benefits for local health districts and specialty health networks through productivity savings, reduced server downtime and the ability to scale server capacity.
One example is the Sydney Children’s Hospital Network where the ability to quickly scale up their cloud-hosted server capacity has reduced the risk of an outage. An overloaded server could cause clinical or corporate applications to stop running, impacting patient care.
So far, more than half of the 825 in-scope applications have been migrated to eHealth NSW’s cloud platform and service. These include applications such as Medical Director, Cardiovascular Imaging, NSW Health’s Rapid Response (ICU) application and clinical surveillance applications.
Almost a third of the 1,740 servers identified as cloud candidates have also been migrated.
Cloud Community Day
In April 2023 eHealth NSW hosted a Cloud Community Day in partnership with Microsoft.
The event was an opportunity for representatives from across NSW Health to come together and share their latest cloud technology learnings and insights.
Speakers from South Eastern Sydney Local Health District, NSW Health Pathology and eHealth NSW showcased their latest cloud initiatives.
eHealth NSW Director of Cloud Services, Adam Stanzione said it was great to share, collaborate and interact on all things cloud.
“The day had a great mix of insightful content and certainly demonstrated the progress of cloud technology in healthcare.”
To find out more, visit the Journey to the Cloud solutions page.
The news item above is included in our eHealth NSW July 2023 newsletter.
Download the July 2023 newsletter
