Peninsula Health embarks on $1.6 million upgrade

Major Victorian health provider Peninsula Health has signed Telstra to implement a $1.6 million technology and connectivity upgrade.

Peninsula Health serves Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, with a catchment of 300,000 people, rising to around 400,000 in the peak summer tourism season.

In the 2022-2023 financial year, the health service’s ICT budget was more than $32 million.

Under the contract, Telstra is to replace IT systems across Peninsula Health’s 13 hospital and healthcare sites.

Cisco SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) technology will improve connectivity across the sites, and Telstra is also to upgrade the service’s internet access speeds.

Telstra said the project will deliver “smarter, safer, and more resilient technology”.

“Instead of operating across old IT networks that didn’t talk to each other, our solution will connect four hospitals across the region,” Telstra Enterprise’s group owner for defence and public sector John Ieraci said.

The “efficient, online-only system … will enable Peninsula Health staff and patients to connect securely to the internet services they want and need," he added.

The solution will also provide greater redundancy, to avoid the “dire” impacts of events such as power outages or local connectivity disruptions.

As well as a fourfold increase in bandwidth across the network, sites will be able to operate independently if there’s a headquarters outage.