Brennan updates Delmont

Delmont Private Hospital has been providing mental health services for around 30 years and is a fully accredited, specialist centre. Dr Mark Bryce and Dr Abe Zelwer have had joint ownership of the hospital for the past 30 years.

If offers a full continuum of psychiatric, drug and alcohol services including; general psychiatric service – inpatient and outpatient; drug and alcohol service –inpatient and outpatient; aged psychiatry service; community nursing service; specialist consulting suite and the Delmont memory clinic.
Patients come into the hospital via voluntary admissions and it’s very different from the public sector, where mental patients have
to be certified.

Peter Selar, CEO of Delmont said its main priority was the mental health of customers and not IT. So when the company’s file server
began wearing down, it turned to local IT&T service Brennan to upgrade hardware.

“We had been experiencing technical issues and systems would freeze and need rebooting. The network was slowing down when we were working. Brennan came in and recommended that we upgrade our system. The service provider took its ideas to the governing board and the owners were supportive in upgrading the business hardware,” he said.

Upgrading the server
Dave Stevens, managing director of Brennan IT said it helped Delmont to upgrade its file server because the hardware technology was aged and redundant. He said the hospital worked closely with Brennan to help them understand how much downtime the network could have.

Also January is one of the busiest times of the year and the number of users who needed access to the desktop had to be taken into consideration to make sure there was minimal impact to the organisation, said Stevens.
Brennan has been supplying services to Delmont for a number of years and it was the hospital’s first link for IT support.

“Brennan is our only IT support although the owners see the advantage of running a business with good technology. We are a private psychiatric facility. Our expertise is definitely not in IT. We know how to deal with patients needing access to specialists and infection control,” said Selar.

On an average day there’s about 50 users across the hospital’s network all logging into a PC to check email, use Excel and send out memos. In addition to that, there’s about 70 psychiatric practitioners visiting the clinic and they typically have IT connection to access their email, said Selar.
Due to the comings and goings of doctors and the hospital’s decision to make memos accessible on a network, its hardware system speed was becoming an issue. With the additional users logging in and out, the hospital’s facility doubled in size and laboured under new users coming onboard.

“People would think there is a lot of nurses just running around with charts in folders, but in today’s technology environment the majority of nurses communicate online. Hospitals also put out a lot of memos and it’s easier to track them on a network than printing them out,”
said Selar. “It’s also sometimes easier for hospital staff to use email to
send messages than have face-to-face meetings.”

Improving resources
From an organisational point of view, having everyone online provides improved resources. Staff can focus on specialising in the care of patients when they have resources to help with the logistics of running a hospital, said Selar.

“We aren’t any different from any other business in regards to the upkeep of general administration work such as making sure minutes from every meeting is accessible for the necessary people,” said Selar.

Having a high-performance system frees people up so they can concentrate on their main expertise and take out the frustration of menial admin work, he said.

Stevens said Delmont is typical of the types of client which Brennan does business with – a mid-tier organisation – with a business model which looks at using technology as a long-term strategy to sustain the business.

“We approached them within regards to what was happening with its network. As an outsourcer we have the ability to continually check on the stability of hardware and what the business needs in terms of technology,” he said.

The Delmont project took around three people in its heavy stages and this included one senior consultant running the majority of the project themselves, said Stevens.

During the early stages of a project such as this, Brennan would go back to the existing infrastructure and do a business analysis. Then it’s a matter of planning and making sure the project doesn’t cause any outage, said Stevens.

Building the technology
It’s then a matter of building the data, reconfiguring the data and commissioning user testing.

“The project is typical of what we would regularly do. But it’s always that 10- or 12-hour window to take the system off-line,” he said.

Stevens said the nature of the Delmont project required three or four staff to work on the weekend. This can be costly not only in terms of money, but employees have private lives which they have to put on hold
to finish the project.

“I don’t think it’s usual in an industry part of the gig and we are much more likely to put ourselves out, rather then take a system off air for the client,” said Steven.

Stevens said the service provider has a set of best practices, which
are policies and procedures on the best way to build an operating
system and Exchange 2003. This has been built and perfected by Brennan technicians.

Brennan’s consulting and project management methodology adheres to Microsoft Operating Framework (MSOF) for design and configuration and then applying ITIL process for Service Delivery and Service Management for ongoing support.

“The use of tier 1 hardware is an important feature of Brennan’s capability in IT consulting and service delivery,” said Stevens. “Typically, we apply a ‘Value For Money’ methodology with a keen eye on warranty, supportability and cost of the hardware platform against the business objectives and fiscal requirements.”

Once the service provider goes through these processes, it then proposed a set of options whereby it was easy for Delmont to understand the cost/benefit model of each option, he said.

Behind the scenes
As for the hardware used in this project, Brennan wanted to opt
for high-performing HP servers with ILO.

“This allows our service desk to easily attach to the server,
across our MPLS network if there is a server outage in the future,”
he said.

“Typically, as with any 24x7 operation such as Delmont Private Hospital, there is never a good time to do an upgrade which causes a required shutdown.”
Brennan chose to use the ‘swing’ method. Essentially, with the
swing method, it was able to implement new servers while upgrading the platform. The migration procedure was then used to move data onto the
new servers.

“With the swing method we were able to upgrade existing hardware and make it more functional and more powerful, then we gradually reintroduced
it into the production environment with minimal disturbance to Delmont Private Hospital’s users,” said Stevens.