Sunshine Hospital
Managed services provider Logicalis Australia has separated and rebuilt the Active Directory for Western Health Victoria after securing a tender.
Western Health manages four public hospitals including Sunshine -- which encompasses Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s --, Footscray, Williamstown and Bacchus Marsh.
On top of this, it also operates Sunbury Day Hospital, Hazledean Transition Care in Williamstown, Melton Hospital, Melton Health and Community Services, Bacchus Marsh Community Health Centre, Caroline Springs Community Health Centre and Grant Lodge Residential Aged Care in Bacchus Marsh.
After Western Health onboarded 3000 new staff during a 12-month period, it was about to embark on a significant amalgamation project, which rendered its old Active Directory a major impediment.
When Western Health requested assistance moving from an Active Directory it shared with two other major hospitals to one of its own.
As the onset of COVID-19 began to impact the state of Victoria, Western Health shifted some of its working models to remote.
Faced with such rapid change, Western Health leaned on Logicalis Australia to complete the highly complex project and navigate additional new and unforeseen challenges that the pandemic presented.
Logicalis Australia health care sector lead Sam Psathas said one result of the Active Directory re-build was that it acted as an enabler for modernising the business further, particularly around the digital workplace.
“Importantly, Western Health has a significantly improved security posture, and its identity system for onboarding and offboarding staff can now be practically instantaneous,” Psathas said. “It is an infinitely better end-user experience with a single sign-on and one identity for all internal systems – instead of having to remember around 15 separate user IDs and passwords previously.”
The focus was to avoid unnecessary changes for staff, who were navigating the provision of quality healthcare to patients in a new remote-based setting.
“With everything going on, we also experienced supply chain issues, due to the semi-conductor crisis, and were feeling the impacts of the significant pressure placed on our staff,” Western Health director of digital technology services Cameron McBride said.
“Logicalis was able to alleviate the pressure, due to their strong healthcare expertise, and understanding of what is required to run a 24-hour emergency service. They were also able to architect the work around our amalgamation. The team at Logicalis was accommodating, and never took a rigid view when a challenge was presented.”
Last year, Logicalis provided healthcare provider Peninsula Health with infrastructure to support remote working and telehealth services to ensure continuity during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The infrastructure, which utilises Citrix Cloud on Microsoft Azure, allowed for Peninsula Health to deploy secure digital workspaces while also providing a place for sensitive applications, desktop and data resources to be stored in the cloud.
