Reseller refreshes keeping the faith in PCs

CASE STUDY THREE: Sonic Healthcare

Independent practitioner network 

When encountering a distressed patient for the first time, the First Aid book says ascertain their physical state and stabilise their condition.

Sonic Healthcare PMO project manager Karl O’Connor took this first-responder approach to uplifting an eight-year-old medical IT network. The project came in preparation for an e-health overhaul on the 300-clinic Independent Practitioner Network (IPN) of serviced medical rooms that it had acquired. 

“That environment hadn’t been refreshed in eight years. They’d been using a hodge-podge of anything and everything from Windows XP to Windows 7 and other devices hanging off an unmanaged domain.” 

Unmanaged, consumer-grade connectivity was supplied by several ISPs: “Supporting the network was a nightmare because you never knew what you were going to meet.”

With Sonic’s chief operating officer as his champion, O’Connor created an enterprise network to link ultimately 5,000 new Dell PCs running a Windows 7 standard operating environment. System Center Configuration Manager handles patching and deployment, and software was remediated to comply with licensing rules. 

A ‘mixed bag’ of servers was standardised and equipment in doctors’ offices locked in a rack with uninterruptible power, and air-conditioning to meet legislative requirements, while data and electrical cables were replaced. And the phone system was updated to Avaya.

“The biggest challenge was getting the business buy-in to ensure [management] support for the significant organisational change we were introducing; a very structured environment that the organisation and staff weren’t used to,” O’Connor says.

“Less downtime means more productive time at the clinic: less time calling IT, fewer outages; [we] deliver a stable platform to allow you to perform your critical role that is doctoring or nursing or admin rather than having to support things internally and contact service desks. Remove that completely.”

The new system will consolidate practice and clinical management software systems into a single application, Best Practice. 

Sonic is progressively rolling out the IT over two years, and has completed 24 sites to date. O’Connor is pleased that staff are warming to the rollout and asking to be bumped up the list. O’Connor says the remotely managed infrastructure is well received with “negligible” calls to the service desk.

O’Connor says the previous support organisation lacked understanding of the role of IT. “If it worked, it worked and if it took a fair bit of pain to maintain, so be it. Sonic has a much more structured view.”

O’Connor’s teams started by rolling out one site per weekend and he plans to ramp up to four sites a weekend across Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia. To speed it up, O’Connor convinced Dell to store 300 small form factor PCs locally, instead of shipping them from Malaysia.

Fact file

Devices Dell small form factor i5 desktops, 4GB RAM, 50GV SSD

Number deployed 5,000 PCs (600 deployed so far)

Supplier Dell

Other technology deployed Dell servers, cables, UPS, air-conditioning, racks and managed services, practice management
and patient reporting systems

Client status New

Technology replaced Eight-year-old PCs
and unmanaged network

Business case Provide a stable, compliant and managed network to support doctors’ offices and provide a foundation for
e-health innovation

Challenges 300 offices spread across Australia; writing the business case;
user acceptance and training

Timeline Two years, progressive rollout (up to four offices a weekend)