Qld budget commits $135m to health IT upgrades

The Queensland government has set aside $135.4 million in its 2017-18 budget to ramp up the state’s delivery of digital healthcare.

The initiative covers investment in Queensland Health’s core infrastructure in order to "support digital hospitals", budget papers state.

It will also allow for the replacement and enhancement of  “core clinical and business systems to support frontline health service provision, corporate functions and decision making at the point of care".

The state’s 2015 ehealth investment strategy had identified replacing ageing core systems as crucial for the delivery of future health services. It earmarked $1.2 billion for ICT infrastructure, clinical systems and business systems over five years.

Queensland Health has opted to replace its massive legacy environment by improving the plumbing between the systems, allowing it to replace ageing platforms one piece at a time.

It is also currently in the early stages of decommissioning its 20-year-old SAP ERP platform and upgrading to an on-premise version of SAP S/4HANA.

Elsewhere in the budget, the state’s peak IT agency, the Department of Science, IT and Innovation (DSITI), was allocated $20 million in 2017-18 to continue its one-stop shop government services transformation.

It is the second time the long-running program has received top-up funding since it was announced in October 2013.

DSITI also received $12.7 million over two years for the first phase of the four-year digital archive program, which aims to develop and implement a whole-of-government digital archiving solution for permanent value digital records.

The agency also got $3.3 million in 2017-18 for the first phase of the science ICT remediation and renewal program, which is targeted at ensuring "integrated, coherent and reliable" scientific information that offers better insights and data.

The state’s internal infrastructure provider, CITEC, was given $4 million to replace its mainframe environment.

CITEC has already begun looking to buy a new pair of IBM mainframes to replace the two z/12 EC machines running of its Polaris data centre in Springfield and the Edward Street data centre in Brisbane.

CITEC also scored $3.3 million to replace hardware, and $2.1 million for critical software enhancements within its information brokerage practice, which is set to expand to meet the government’s needs for data sharing and data science.

Other new measures funded in the budget include:

• $56.7 million over two years to continue the rollout of the integrated electronic medical records program (ieMR).
• $11.7 million for Treasury to deliver an upgraded ICT platform and improved revenue management as part of the Office of State Revenue transformation program.
• $3.6 million for the Crime and Corruption Commission to develop a new investigations case management system, as well as a further $3.4 million for computer and equipment replacement.
• $2.9 million for the Department of Premier and Cabinet to enhance the state child death register and reporting capability, including ICT upgrade and migration and entry of data from existing systems and files.
• $2.6 million for the Department of Communities, Child Safety and Disability Services to develop a whole-of-government ICT system to improve information sharing.
• $1.1 million over two years for the implementation of the government’s open data policy statement and action plan.
• $6.3 million for the Electoral Commission to replace its strategic elections management system.
• $2.2 million for Queensland Shared Services to consolidate and upgrade the finance and human resource systems it manages.