Bendigo Health jumps to Microsoft Azure with Mexia

Bendigo Health engaged Mexia to provide integration services after selecting Microsoft BizTalk Server hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud as its preferred enterprise integration engine to deliver the regional health services vision of a digital hospital.

Bendigo Health employs some 3500 people across an area a quarter the size of Victoria, and growing. Part of its plan for a new world-class digital Bendigo Hospital was to enable the whole-of-hospital information view of each patient and achieve a single integrated medical record.

However, Bendigo Health's existing on-premises ICT infrastructure couldn’t provide the required real-time integration to legacy and new ICT systems, patient monitoring systems, imaging devices and other clinical systems.

Firstly, Bendigo Health needed to consolidate the multitude of existing on-premises integration engines into one single integration platform that could support connectivity for both clinical and non-clinical systems. Secondly all existing integration solutions needed to be modernised from brittle point-to-point interfaces that could be monitored and easily improved. Finally, Bendigo needed to adopt open technology platform supportable by any number of vendors, providing them opportunity to seek value for money from their suppliers now and into the future.

After going out to tender, Bendigo Health partnered with Melbourne-based Mexia, with the project kicking off in mid-2016. Mexia is an award-winning Australian IT consultancy that specialises in designing, delivering and supporting integration solutions using Microsoft technologies.

Over the course of six months leading up to the opening of the new hospital on 24 January 2017, Bendigo Health and Mexia delivered a landmark example of an electronic medical record (EMR) integration platform using Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft Azure cloud technologies. This solution was a first for the tertiary health sector in Australia using cloud technology.

Key to the engagement was Mexia’s expertise in managing the complexity associated with ensuring all hospital ICT systems could leverage the integration platform, regardless of whether they were communicating with HL7 healthcare data standard or non-clinical message formats.

Mexia’s solution also leveraged both Microsoft Azure cloud data centres in Australia to provide platform scalability and resilience not possible with other cloud vendors. The integration platform will easily scale to handle the forecasted 10x increase in message processing volume as more Bendigo Hospital services are brought online.

Bendigo Health CIO Bruce Winzar said: “We chose Mexia because of their specialist experience in Microsoft integration technologies, and for their ability to manage integration complexity in a health environment. Their agile delivery methodologies and high-quality documentation enabled us to meet our tight timelines.”

Mexia is a finalist in the Digital Transformation category at the 2017 CRN Impact Awards. The full list of finalists will be announced at our CRN Pipeline conference in Melbourne on 22-23 March. The winners will be announced at the Impact Awards dinner during the CRN Pipeline conference in Sydney on 6-7 April.

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