Townsville University Hospital (TUH) is the tertiary referral hospital for Townsville Hospital and Health Service (HHS), supporting a population of almost 250,000 people across northern Queensland, including isolated indigenous communities. The hospital and health service treat about 355 patients in its emergency departments, 1188 patients through its outpatient clinics, and about 38 people in the operating theatres as well as discharging about 298 inpatients per day. Due to the region’s geographical diversity, TUH IT team had a goal to be aligned with the hospital’s strategy – to enable the Townsville region access world-class healthcare regardless of their geographic location.
Previously, TUH relied on older technologies that did not harness the latest in storage innovation. As a result, the dashboards used in the wards had low reload times and obtaining accurate medical histories was a slow process because patient records had to be found and manually updated.
Now, with Dell Technologies’ low latency and high input/output operations per second (IOPS) storage running TUH’s data lake, the foundation of its ward management and patient flow reporting systems, staff can perform near real-time reporting instead of batch processing, improving efficiency and access to current information.
Storage Solutions Empowering TUH
After testing against other vendors, TUH chose Dell Technologies storage solutions, including Dell PowerStore 5000T and Dell PowerScale, for their performance, redundancy, scalability, and flexibility. The new solutions enable TUH to leverage infrastructure to support healthcare solutions with a focus in delivering positive patient outcomes.
The new smart storage system has significantly reduced the time it takes to manage the system, so that the IT team can focus on improving the digitisation of healthcare across the hospital.
At the same time, the hospital has seen significant growth in clinical media from pathology, microbiology, cardiology, and sleep studies, as well as increased requirements such as the storage of CCTV over a long retention period. TUH has implemented Dell PowerScale which provides a single repository for unstructured data leveraging a highly available and cost-effective architecture.
Improving the Healthcare Journey
Barry Koch, Director of Information Technology Services Digital Health and Knowledge at Townsville HHS, says Dell Technologies’ solutions have been integral to the hospital’s digital transformation.
Koch says, “Dell Technologies has provided a collaborative and health-centric solution in a complex environment to support our patients, clinicians and staff’s digital journey, and are integral to the hospital’s digital transformation by understanding and partnering with the health service.”
Koch is excited about what Dell Technologies’ solutions can offer, both for TUH and other providers looking to model their services on TUH’s success.
He says, “We want to be the leader of healthcare in the northern region of QLD. It’s a blank canvas at the moment; we can implement change in an agile fashion using scalable solutions that Dell Technologies is continually innovating.”
Angela Fox, Senior Vice President and Managing Director, Dell Technologies ANZ, says, “The success TUH has had since implementing Dell Technologies solutions is promising. What is exciting is that these Dell Technologies solutions are scalable, and the results are repeatable. TUH represents as a successful example of what’s possible for digitally transformed healthcare, and our team is proud to be an enabler for TUH’s patients with access to world-class healthcare wherever they are.”
