HP Australia has won a contract to supply and maintain ICT services to a portion of South Australia’s new $2.1 billion digital Royal Adelaide Hospital (RAH).
Under the contract, HP will work with the SA Health Partnership (SAHP) consortium, which encompasses Leighton Contractors, Hansen Yuncken, Macquarie and Spotless, to design, build and maintain the hospital’s ICT infrastructure for the facility throughout its construction, which is scheduled to be completed in 2016. It will also operate and maintain the ICT systems for the following 30 years.
HP South Pacific vice president of enterprise services, Alan Bennett, said he could not disclose the exact figure the contract is worth, but told Computerworld Australia the new 800-bed hospital would be the first recipient of HP’s “version 2.0 digital hospital solution”, which includes software applications that link conventional building engineering systems to the communications systems and their mobile devices.
“In Australia, this is the first time HP has been engaged to perform an applications integration role at a hospital,” Bennett said.
“HP has already commenced project mobilisation activities, including the establishment of early application development and test environments, in preparation for design development activities with the HYLC [Hansen Yuncken and Leighton Contractors] consortium and the state of SA.”
According to Bennett, HP will be responsible for “reviewable” ICT services, which will be ITIL-aligned and include the provision and administration of an ongoing in-facility integrated test environment for the pre-deployment testing of application and equipment changes.
The service will centre on the role of the “integration engine” as the central means of incorporating the ICT and building engineering systems into “workflows”; a process HP will manage. The new RAH’s internal systems will be built on HP converged infrastructure using virtualised, clustered and dual-redundant systems and will integrate with the state government’s health patient admission and medical records.
This will include the construction of automation and security systems for staff, a smartphone- and tablet-friendly communications system, and real-time location system (RTLS) technology to track patients and equipment.
A nurse call system, picture archiving and bedside terminals will also be integrated.
“The benefits to clinicians accrue from increased mobile access to more integrated and authoritative data,” Bennett said. “Mobile, event-driven access means that clinicians spend less time looking for information in the first place and have more confidence in using it, because it has generally been delivered in near real-time from the originating data source.”
The SAHP consortium won the bid to finance, build and maintain the new facility in December last year after being shortlisted alongside the Torrens Health Partnership in May. The Torrens Health partnership includes Bilfinger Berger Project Investments and Services, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lend Lease Infrastructure Investments, Baulderstone/Bovis Lend Lease and ISS Health Services.
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