Queensland’s largest public hospital and health service, Metro North Hospital and Health Service, has deployed the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform, and claims it helped to reduce costs and develop new digital services.
The Nutanix deployment, designed to improve patient care and the flexibility of delivering clinical information systems, is across Metro North Hospital and Health Service (MNHHS) comprising five hospitals including Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, The Prince Charles Hospital, Redcliffe, Caboolture and Kilcoy Hospitals in Brisbane’s north.
Metro North’s solutions architect Antony Batrouni said the consolidation with Nutanix meant going from four data centres to one highly resilient primary site with a remote disaster recovery site.
“We needed something that could scale quickly to meet the demands of a much larger organisation, and that’s when we selected Nutanix,” Batrouni said.
{loadposition peter}Batrouni said the additional IT capability achieved with Nutanix has enabled a commensurate platform for digital services to be implemented within the hospital group.
Nutanix deployed the MNHHS electronic Referral Management system and Enterprise Service Bus, which will be extended for broader clinical services in the near term.
Batrouni said the types of systems the HHS was launching now were more complex than ever before, with a DevOps team focused on developing innovative services for clinicians to enable them to provide better care to patients.
“Nutanix ensures these services are reliable and can be turned into a platform faster than ever before.” he said.
Nutanix says the deployment has also enabled Metro North to make significant cost savings in database management systems licensing fees and a total reduction in cost of almost 50% per virtual machine (VM) deployed.
“In a hospital environment, any cost savings made in areas such as IT are then available to be invested back into patient care,” Batrouni said.
According to Nutanix, MNHHS is looking to new technology to bring additional services to benefit patients, such as advanced medical imaging and, overall, the platform has led to increased performance, higher availability and improved disaster recovery design across the 800 applications used daily by staff.
Nutanix says the platform is supporting around four times its previous workload, with additional capacity to spare, delivering a better user experience and mitigated impact to clinical staff and patients if there are any outages or other issues.
“Health organisations and the patients they care for can gain huge benefits from digital transformation,” said Matt Young, senior vice-president and head of APJ, Nutanix.
“To realise that potential, you need the right infrastructure in place to manage it. Metro North is using enterprise cloud technology to save costs and develop digital services that have real benefits for clinicians and patients.”