WA Health has announced a $124m deal with French ICT and cloud services giant, Atos, to deliver a comprehensive five-year digital transformation program expected to advance the provision of healthcare to WA citizens.
 

Atos said it will leverage GovNext-ICT infrastructure – WA’s whole-of-government, cloud-backed ICT transformation program – to deliver its digitisation program, transitioning WA Health’s largely centralised ICT infrastructure into a fully managed hybrid digital cloud service.

“A modern and contemporary cloud-based ICT system will enable us to respond better to innovation that will help improve patient care and reduce unnecessary duplication,” said Chief Information Officer at WA’s Health Support Services, Holger Kaufmann.  

The new hybrid cloud environment aligns neatly with GovNext’s own on-demand service delivery agenda, providing WA Health with a recurrent consumption model “which scales and shrinks as required”, Atos said.

“[This will provide] WA Health with new agility that will enhance operational processes and reduce costs while improving the patient experience in the public health system,” the company said in a release.

The comprehensive healthcare ICT program will operate across a mix of private cloud, managed public cloud, hybrid cloud orchestration, co-location and managed services across “2,000 servers, over 1,000 applications, and a fully managed Oracle Cloud platform.”

WA Health said its new hybridised cloud program will deliver numerous cost and service benefits to the public healthcare provider, including an ability to scale on-demand operational costs, depending on the agency’s infrastructure needs, and a new ‘pay-as-you-go’ framework that sidesteps capex-based delivery models.

Atos will coordinate with WA’s Health Support Services (HSS), the health system’s ICT service provider, to transition WA Health from its legacy infrastructure, originally provided by Fujitsu.

Rolled out back in 2010, WA Health’s existing centralised computing infrastructure faced mounting scrutiny following reports of mismanagement and excessive cost blowouts, exceeding its $45 million budget by nearly 400 per cent.