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    Healthcare heroes: Care amidst chaos

    IT Challenge 

    Optimizing for cloud and clinicians

    As its services have evolved and transformed, the reputation of Canterbury DHB has spread across New Zealand and beyond. Today, the Board is a service provider to the entire South Island for critical clinical applications.

    Delivering those applications with reliability and resilience regardless of location, and regardless of surrounding circumstances is of tantamount importance to the Board.

    “We need to ensure that we’re making the best choices for what needs to be on-prem, what needs to be in our private cloud, and what opportunities we have to leverage cost reductions in the public cloud,” Ward explains.

    For Canterbury DHB, the challenge became another opportunity to improve not just IT but processes. “Every IT challenge is also a people challenge,” Ward says. “So the first thing is inspiring people about where we’re going and how they can come with us on this journey.”

    Solution

    The right technology enables better care

    Canterbury turned to HPE Pointnext Services for hybrid cloud strategy expertise. HPE consultants performed an assessment of the Board’s applications against security, governance, economic, and capability standards.

    “The idea is that if we put our applications on the right technology, it ultimately means that people will find it easier to use,” Ward says. “And when it’s easy to use, then it doesn’t get in the way of the people-to-people part of our job, which is the important part of care: clinician to patient.”

    Together, Canterbury and HPE are planning a long-range cloud journey that will encourage both technical improvement and human opportunity.

    It’s a move toward bold innovation for an industry that tends to favor more familiar solutions. “Healthcare systems don’t like taking risks, but with the framework that HPE brings, we can take the risk out, because there’s a robust methodology at the core that’s proven successful many times over,” Ward explains.

    Results

    Transforming care through cloud adoption

    Twenty weeks into their cloud transformation, IT leaders at Canterbury DHB began to experience a more agile way of delivering care on the South Island and beyond.

    “We’re already seeing the ability for us to deliver new features and functionality to our clinicians in a much faster way,” Ward relates. “When we hear about a problem, we’re able to quickly identify why they need our support and be much more responsive.”

    As a result of working with HPE Pointnext Services consultants, the team at Canterbury is less tied to physical IT and more focused on capabilities. “Now instead of thinking about our infrastructure, we’re thinking about features that can drive innovation to the business,” Ward says. “In fact, we don’t see this as an IT program—it’s a business transformation program.”

    Moving to a hybrid cloud approach also opens up new opportunities for Canterbury as a service provider beyond its walls. “As we’re able to leverage the capability of the public cloud, more district health boards could choose to have us as their service provider—and that could free them up from an infrastructure perspective and allow them to focus on local needs,” Ward explains. “And that creates an opportunity for us to attract more talent and deliver to an increased customer base.”