Peninsula Health appoints Telstra for $1.6m tech upgrade

Peninsula Health, a major public health service for Frankston and Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, has contracted Telstra to deliver a $1.6 million technology and connectivity upgrade with an aim to improve patient outcomes and experiences.

As part of the deal, Telstra will replace Peninsula Health’s existing IT systems across its 13 hospital and healthcare sites with smarter, safer and more resilient technology, CISCO SDWAN, faster internet services and simplify existing contracts and processes helping to drive cost efficiencies.

David English, Peninsula Health Executive Director Digital Health & Informatics, said the technology boost will not only help make operations more efficient but also allow the organisation to focus on the job of providing care to patients and community members, close to home.

“This will be a game changer in how our staff will be able to work with faster, more agile systems as well as our patients and their loved ones who will be benefit from the greater connectivity and guest internet across all of our sites,” English said.

John Ieraci, Telstra Enterprise Group Owner for Defence & Public Sector said, “Instead of operating across old IT networks that didn’t talk to each other, our solution will connect all four hospitals across the region, moving to a more efficient online-only system that will enable Peninsula Health staff and our patients to connect securely to the internet services they want and need.

“The impact for a hospital or health service if there is a power outage or local disruption can be particularly dire, which is why the program of works will also be including more redundancy to help ensure the system is as resilient as possible,” Ieraci said.

The deal will also deliver:

• A capacity boost: Population growth across Frankston, Mornington Peninsula and parts of the City of Kingston is on the rise. Once the project is complete, Peninsula Health will have increased capacity to help ensure that they can manage the demand now and into the future.
• More bandwidth and local survivability: Overall boost in speed through a 4x increase in bandwidth across the network, with a solution that also enables local sites to operate independently and uninterrupted in the event of an outage at headquarters.
   

The project is scheduled to be completed by mid-to-late 2024.

Image credit: iStock.com/Rafik