Partnership to deliver dynamic ICT services to the WA health system

Providing ICT services to WA Health is one of the remits of HSS, and we’ve just extended a key ICT services partnership for a further five years with industry-leading cybersecurity, cloud and high-performance computing giant, Atos.

Since first partnering in 2018, HSS and Atos have facilitated several major WA Health projects, including migrating approximately 1,000 clinical and corporate applications to the Atos hybrid cloud, as well as legacy ICT infrastructure and records under the State's GovNext-ICT framework and HealthNext project.

HSS Chief Information Officer, Jonathan Smith, said, “Together, we have already successfully delivered the largest application re-platforming program undertaken by WA Health, which was completed successfully and met government requirements in terms of security and compliancy.

“We are looking forward to continuing our work with Atos to help implement our WA Health digital strategy.”

HealthNext demonstrated the scale and complexity of project that HSS and ATOS can deliver together. It was a massive success providing:

• higher levels of transparency about our consumption of infrastructure and associated costs, allowing us to better understand when and what infrastructure needs to scale or shrink and the cost/benefit
• higher levels of redundancy, enabling faster recovery in the event of infrastructure failure
• improved infrastructure resilience and service availability
• improved compliance with security policies and practices, better securing sensitive patient data
• greater levels of customer satisfaction with infrastructure services
• higher levels of staff engagement, with HSS teams now working with a contemporary infrastructure platform that stays current due to continual re-investment and refresh by our vendor partner, Atos
• data centre energy consumption reductions of 19%.

This successful partnership has paved the way for further ICT improvements, including:

• the new medical imaging system for the WA public health system.
• management of critical clinical and corporate applications, including our patient administration system, on cloud infrastructure.
• migration of WA health system’s entire email platform and other collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, to the Atos managed cloud.

Furthermore, Atos’ 'pay as you go' consumption model has been critical to enable WA Health to quickly scale its infrastructure in response to changing demand, which was instrumental in the State’s successful response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Under the new contract, Atos will continue working with HSS to provide and evolve our WA Health hybrid cloud services,” said Jonathan Smith.

“The new contract cements the strong partnership between Atos and HSS and our shared commitment to delivering excellent patient care to more than 500 healthcare sites and services across WA Health.”