Digital transformation

In the event of its primary EMR system going offline, GHA can have a backup system ready to go in a matter of hours. And, by using backup and disaster recovery sites located in Australia rather than overseas, the alliance can also achieve data sovereignty.

By having the EMR system hosted on a secure network, it can prevent extensive damage to it by detecting potential threats.

The resilience of GHA’s cloud-based EMR platform was put to the test in 2019 when it was subjected to a sophisticated cyber attack that prevented access to a number of critical systems, including its financial management system.

“Our CCU team was able to review the patient’s notes on the EMR and, with the help of our intensivist, begin planning for treatment while we progressed efforts to secure them a bed. As a result, the patient was prioritised for admission.

Without immediate access to this information on the EMR, our team would not have been able to fully review the complexities of the case and treatment may have been delayed.

Keeping Costs Down

As well as enjoying improved clinical outcomes and scalability, GHA has been able to avoid purchase, installation and maintenance costs associated with traditional IT infrastructure.

“One of the current challenges for us due to the COVID-19 pandemic is there would be a significant risk right now with the provisioning of physical hardware,” Shearer said.

“That’s not a concern for us with the

Azure environment and our hosting with Altera Digital Health as part of this project. If we were doing this by ourselves, we would have had an impact on resources trying to put this equipment in.”

And, if any of the hardware used to help power GHA’s system needs upgrading, there is no additional cost to make it cloud-compatible.

Safe And Secure

By moving its EMR system to the cloud and hosting it on a secure network, GHA has been able to take advantage of several security and business continuity benefits.

These include Azure’s built-in firewalls, which are designed to reduce downtime for the EMR system and prevent extensive damage to it by detecting potential threats.

System performance is constantly monitored using another built-in service, which generates alerts that the support team at Altera Digital Health and Microsoft Azure can respond to.

Although the alliance was forced to quarantine some of its systems following the attack, there was no evidence of unauthorised access to patient data.

“While we had to disable connectivity to our EMR due to security reasons, it was ready the day we said we were ready to come back online,” Shearer said.

“And that was purely based on the fact that it was hosted in Azure and protected by the Azure infrastructure.

“As soon as we were given the green light, the servers to the EMR were turned back on, and it was genuinely the first application that was ready for us to start.”

GHA has also boosted its risk resilience by rolling out a scanning and document management capability, embedded within the Sunrise EMR system. This enables hospitals to digitise old and new paper records from other connected health sites and ancillary services.

According to Shearer, Sunrise Document Manager addresses the inevitable need for the ongoing management of paper records in an EMR system.

“It achieves this in a risk-resilient, seamless and sustainable way,” he said.