Southern Cross Healthcare(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 88

Senior IS executives: Colin Thrush, IS manager, Southern Cross Hospitals and April Walker, GM IS, Southern Cross Medical Care Society (pictured)
Report to: National Services Manager and Chief Executive Southern Cross Insurance respectively
Size of IS shop: 60

PCs: 354
Mobile PCs: 182
Terminals: 1109
Hand-held devices: 83
Total screens: 1728

Industry: Health and community services
PC environment: HP, Windows XP
Server environment: HP, Linux, Windows 2003
DBMS: SQL, Oracle
Address: Level 10, Quay Tower, 29 Customs Street West, Auckland and 181 Grafton Road, Auckland
Websites: www.southerncrosshospitals.co.nz and www.southerncross.co.nz
Key IS projects this year: Hospitals WAN/LAN redesign; patient management system replacement; HR application implementation; e-commerce initiatives; internal process and workflow efficiencies.

Southern Cross Healthcare is a group of health-related businesses operating at arms length from each other under a common brand and with a shared not-for-profit philosophy. The Southern Cross Medical Care Society has more than 840,000 members. Southern Cross Hospitals is New Zealand’s largest private surgical hospital network with 16 wholly-owned or joint-venture facilities from Auckland to Invercargill. Southern Cross Travel Insurance is a leading online travel insurer.

The Medical Care Society’s GM IS, April Walker, says her focus is continuing SOA-based migration from their legacy environment, building new products and service offerings and concentrating on developing the e-commerce channel and capability.

Southern Cross Hospitals IS Manager, Colin Thrush, says his emphasis will be on data network and communication improvements to ensure the individual IT resilience of every hospital within their network, and enabling efficient access for each hospital to a newly installed, shared Patient Administration application and other service support systems. This year will see continued investment on VoIP technology with the rollout of new call recording solutions for Southern Cross call centres, further investment in their e-commerce channel and a large effort towards improving IT
resilience and capability at each of their hospitals.