Three compete to be Healthcare CIO of the year

Richard Royle - UnitingCare Health

St Stephen’s Digital Hospital

While not officially working under the title of CIO, Royle's passion lies with eHealth, and he has channelled that passion into the establishment of St Stephen’s private hospital in Queensland’s Hervey Bay.

When it opened its doors in October, St Stephens became the first Australian hospital to achieve HIMSS stage 6 certification [pdf], meaning it is well on its way towards reaching the pinnacle of the eight-point international scale of electronic medical record systems adoption and integration.

The facility features fully automated care pathways, alerts, and medication management. It is trialling fully paperless prescribing, dispensing and claiming so as to conduct all medication transactions electronically end-to-end, and all elements of its electronic medical records are integrated the hospital’s medical devices. 

Peter O'Halloran - National Blood Authority

myABDR

O’Halloran and his team spotted an opportunity to provide Australians suffering from bleeding disorders with a tool to record bleeds and their home-based treatments, while also hooking into the Australian Bleeding Disorders Registry to exchange the information with their doctors in real-time.

Just months after launch, the myABDR app has already caught the eye of several other nations keen to buy the technology from the NBA, making the team confident of recouping their development costs early on the app's life.

Health management benefits aside, the app also offers the potential for patients and health administrators to share information that will allow the blood authority to better manage the nation’s inventory of blood products by tracking recalled and soon-to-expire products.

It has already recorded significant returns on investment by reducing preventable discards of clotting factor products.

Dmitri Mirvis - Mercy Health

Full data centre migration to the cloud

Mercy Health faced the prospect of having to overhaul its base IT infrastructure in order to meet the business’ ambitions for dramatic growth in its service offerings, and enable it to develop rather than just maintain.

CIO Dmitri Mirvis and his team opted to get out of the business of owning and operating data centres altogether and migrate the organisation’s production and data recovery environments into a managed cloud environment inside two geographically removed hosted facilities. 

Three months after making the switch, the hospital is already experiencing reduced downtime, and no longer faces the need to replace end-of-life equipment. The healthcare provider is also now benefiting from an IT workforce that is developing contemporary IT skills rather than focussing on keeping the lights on.