Health board close to linked system

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland's district health boards are moving towards their vision of a shared IT infrastructure.

The Counties Manukau board is replacing its Peoplesoft financial system with Oracle 11i Financials.

Phil Brimacombe, the chief financial officer for Counties Manukau and Waitemata Health, said that rather than buying a whole new system, the board would use the system already in place at Waitemata.

Control of that system has been shifted to a shared services company set up by the two boards, healthAlliance.

"The expectation is shared systems mean lower hardware maintenance costs and lower software costs," Brimacombe said.

HealthAlliance was set up about 18 months ago to handle joint procurement, but has since been taking on more roles.

Waitemata Health has in recent months rolled out laboratory and results reporting systems from Sysmex-Delphic, which are hosted at Middlemore Hospital.

Both boards use the PIMS patient management system from British firm Isoft, also hosted at Middlemore.

Brimacombe said the next project would be to roll out the Orion suite of clinical management systems into Waitemata.

These include a clinical workstation to give a clinician a single point of access for all data about a patient, an electronic discharge system, an emergency care patient tracking system and an integrated disease management system, used to manage South Auckland's several hundred diabetes patients.

"We are also looking at using that system for patients with heart and respiratory disease," Brimacombe said.

He said the boards had been talking with Healthcare Auckland about bringing it under the shared services umbrella.

Auckland is assessing PIMS. It is a long-time user of Oracle Financials, and upgraded to 11i in 2000.

"We have had a large number of visitors from A+ to Middlemore to look at how the PIMS system is deployed.

"We are also in discussion about other system areas and opportunities for regional alignment. That might, in some cases, mean a common system," Brimacombe said.

HealthAlliance manager Robin Skeggs said the company was talking to other district health boards about the services it could offer, and was close to signing a deal to run Taranaki District Health Board's Oracle systems.

Skeggs said putting Counties Manukau on Oracle Financials was costing about $600,000.

"From an overall perspective the cost goes up but the ongoing costs are shared over a bigger pool of users."

He said studies of the shared services model estimated likely operational savings of between 10 and 30 per cent.

"We are budgeting on 9 per cent savings this year."