Mercy Health and Aged Care Central Queensland Limited employs 1,200 staff and healthcare professionals, and provides a range of healthcare services across central Queensland.

The Challenge: Centralising Management of Facilities in Regional Locations

When Mercy Health and Aged Care sought to centralise the management of administrative functions for five hospitals and aged care facilities, it grappled with a mixed bag of IT systems and processes across five regional cities.

Centralising IT was a cornerstone for an ambitious program of planned business process change. An urgent need to replace the ageing IBM AS/400 legacy system — which ran core financial management and patient billing systems — became the initial catalyst for the move. Mercy Health and Aged Care also wanted to standardise a broader set of hospital functions, from patient information systems and nurse rostering to building and engineering management and incident reporting.

“In the past, each site controlled its own IT system, so that one facility would have one kind of system, and another would have something different,” Information Systems officer Marcia Healy said. “With a small staff, we have limited capabilities. Travelling among five sites meant that we had even less time to manage and maintain our IT systems.”  

The mishmash of IT systems had also caused Mercy Health and Aged Care real headaches in developing and maintaining a coherent disaster recovery strategy. Additionally, the plan to centralise IT allowed the organisation to meet health sector data security compliance obligations more easily.

Implementing a Citrix Application Delivery Infrastructure Solution

Mercy Health and Aged Care engaged Citrix Systems, Hewlett Packard and Citrix® Solution Advisor Professional Advantage to help design a solution based on Citrix Presentation Server™ with Microsoft® Windows Server® 2003 and Citrix Access Gateway™. Initially, the project focused on financials, moving data from the legacy AS/400 system to a central Microsoft® SQL database, with the Citrix solution delivering Epicor Software’s back-office financial suite. A patient management system from UK-based iSOFT was also among the core systems migrated to the new system early in the project.

The environment is housed on 15 HP servers and an HP Storage Area Network (SAN) at Mercy Health’s Rockhampton Mater Hospital with the configuration exactly replicated as a warm stand-by site for disaster recovery purposes at its corporate head office, also in Rockhampton. The organisation uses PCs as access devices. Back-office administrators (e.g., the payroll department) as well as the nursing staff use on-site terminals to access core applications.

Managers are provided a secure connection to line-of-business applications via Citrix Access Gateway. The ability to work from anywhere — across the five care locations, from home, or on the road — gives management the flexibility to provide their expertise to each branch as needed.

Reduced Complexity, Cost and Risk

“By centralising and standardising our solutions, we’ve been able to standardise configurations and reduce the overall complexity of our IT environment,” said Healy.

The organisation’s greatest concern was that managing the project and then maintaining the new environment would be too much for its tiny four-person IT department. But the deployment of Citrix Presentation Server and Windows Server 2003 reduced IT management overhead and thus allowed the organisation to reduce its IT staffing needs to three. In particular, the improved uptime and standardised application delivery led to a huge reduction in helpdesk calls from users.

The solution originally went live to 55 users, but when Mercy Health and Aged Care added more applications to the Citrix environment the number of users quickly grew to 135.

The Citrix solution gives managers 24/7 secure access whether they are working at the head office, a branch office, home, or on the road from another facility. It also gives IT staff better control over which parts of the system third-party organisations such as software vendors or service providers are allowed to access.

“The Access Gateway solution for secure, remote  application delivery has allowed us to control who connects and what they can access,” Healy said. “We simply did not have the ability to do that before.

“The disaster recovery capability means that we lose only several seconds of data in an emergency,” she added. Data is replicated to the disaster recovery site, and in the event of a failure, users are automatically transferred over to the alternate site. At a hospital, up-to-the minute data is critical to service delivery and underpins business continuity.

Moving to the Citrix solution represented a massive change for Mercy Health, and carried with it all the risks of any large-scale IT project. The organisation was nervous about implementing too quickly due to concerns about its ability to persuade users to embrace the business changes and the new IT environment. However, because of the smooth implementation and overwhelmingly positive user response, Mercy Health and Aged Care is pushing ahead with plans to add all primary applications, such as e-mail and Web-based applications, to the Citrix delivery environment.

“Originally, we didn’t expect to put all our applications on the Citrix environment,” Healy said. “But the patient management system was so successfully deployed that Citrix is now the first thing we think of when we are looking at new solutions.

“We achieved cost savings as we consolidated processes such as accounts payable and payroll for each of the different hospitals and aged care facilities onto a centralised database. So the catalyst for the project was end-of-life issues for some of our legacy systems, but Citrix’s centralised management really changed the way we run our business,” Healy said.

Future Plans

Mercy Health and Aged Care plans to implement Citrix Password Manager™ to take advantage of its single sign-on and improved authentication capabilities.

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