The organisation, which employs 70,000 and has an annual budget of $6 billion, plans to benchmark the cost of its IT services and enterprise applications, as well as what it is paying for infrastructure, including storage, networks, desktop support and helpdesk.
Queensland Health plans to run the benchmarking studies once a year for the next three years, with a contractor to be signed up for an initial review this year, with the option of up to three annual cycle extensions building on the results of the first assessment.
The executive management committee of Queensland Health's information division is expecting its first draft report at the end of October, with the first full report due the following month.
The agency says it is moving towards an increasingly network-centric architecture, a change made possible by the improving availability of wide-area network (WAN) links across the state, with major hospitals being given links of up to 50MB.
"The provision of an effective ICT benchmarking system is core to the information divisions's ability to effectively co-ordinate and maintain an array of information systems across QH," the organisation states in a request for offers.
In last month's state budget, Queensland Health was allocated $150.3 million for e-health initiatives, the strategies for which are currently being developed.
"The e-Health strategy will strongly influence clinical systems and in particular the end-to-end management of patient data and functionality," the request for offer says.
The effect of the e-Health architecture strategy is expected to become apparent in the first quarter of the current financial year, it says.
Autor(en)/Author(s): Chris Jenkins
Quelle/Source: Australian IT, 17.07.2007
