Australian Nursing Service Leaves Linux for Critical Care from Microsoft
Overview
Country or Region
Australia
Industry
Health
Customer Profile
St Luke’s Nursing Service is the oldest and one of the largest community care providers in Queensland, Australia.
It serves 14,000 people in their homes from 24 sites across Queensland and parts of New South Wales and manages an annual income of A$23 million.
Business Situation
To cope with rapid expansion, St Luke’s needed a comprehensive information technology revamp to standardize its hardware and software environment, reduce risk, improve collaboration and provide a solid infrastructure for the future.
Solution
St Luke’s chose a Microsoft® Windows® platform and centralized all business applications and administration of its branch network.
Benefits
§ Standardized hardware and software environment.
§ Central administration of dispersed user base.
§ Improved staff collaboration.
§ Solid infrastructure for future growth. / “We’ve now got a solid infrastructure and that’s so important to us. We can continue to look at ways technology can benefit our organization.”
—Gaylene Coulton, Interim General Manager, St Luke’s Nursing Service
When information technology was identified as its greatest organizational risk, St Luke’s Nursing Service knew the prognosis. With A$23 million in income, 14,000 clients and 24 sites across Queensland and Sydney, Australia, St Luke’s had a lot at stake. Its information technology was a patchwork of operating systems—Linux and Microsoft® Windows®—and various software versions running on 24 different local area networks. St Luke’s undertook a technology revamp worth A$500,000 to standardize on a Microsoft Windows Server™ platform and centralize all business applications and network administration. The result is a solid infrastructure that has reduced IT support costs, established disaster recovery and set the organization for future success in winning government tenders and delivering community care.
Situation
With rising competition for government funds and increasing compliance requirements, operating a successful community care organization in Australia is a serious business.
St Luke’s Nursing Service manages income of A$23 million and services 14,000 people in their homes. When IT infrastructure became its greatest risk, St Luke’s was prepared to outlay A$500,000 to set it right.
With more than a century of nursing experience in Queensland, Australia, St Luke’s is the state’s oldest community provider of home nursing. It is also one of the most comprehensive providers of broader community services such as assistance for people living with HIV/Aids and treatment for mothers with drug dependencies.
St Luke’s has taken on the challenges of delivering community services across a vast geographic territory.
“We don’t do it the easy way,” says Gaylene Coulton, Interim General Manager at St Luke’s. “We’re tackling the tough stuff. Clients are not always people sitting in regional towns; they’re on rural properties where their nearest neighbor is 100 kilometers away.”
For St Luke’s, fulfilling its mission means competing in an increasingly crowded market of service providers vying for limited government funding.
“It’s an open tendering environment so it’s very competitive,” says Coulton. “We’re ‘not-for-profit’, but more importantly we’re also ‘not-for-loss’. Where there is a ‘for profit’ service we can provide that brings money into the organization, that income goes back into improving our services.”
St Luke’s had been winning tenders for years. Its staff had grown fivefold to 500 in five years, income had multiplied sevenfold and its branch network had expanded to 23 offices across two states.
But with such rapid expansion, St Lukes’ information technology systems needed some critical care of their own.
St Luke’s IT Manager, Ben Ward: “IT was the highest risk in the organization. If systems fell over, we couldn’t guarantee a timely recovery.”
In community service provision, this is good reason for concern. At risk were the records St Luke’s needed to meet its accreditation standards and government funding requirements.
St Lukes’ IT was a patchwork of operating systems—a mixture of Linux and Microsoft® Windows®—and different software versions. Each of the 23 branch offices had its own local network running on a Linux server. The structure became unmanageable and costly.
“A local area network comes at a huge support cost,” says Ward. “We had to travel to branches. It was difficult to get support for Linux and, unless staff have some training, it’s difficult to teach people how to overcome Linux issues.”
According to Ward, staff needed to collaborate more closely between branches and corporate office. File and print-sharing were non-existent because everyone was on their own local area network. “If we wanted to share a document we had to email it,” he says.
Solution
St Luke’s put the deployment of a hardware and software revamp to three companies for tender. Local Microsoft Gold Partner Corpnet stood out.
“Corpnet were strong in their reporting and business analyst skills,” says Ward. “They look at the solution from a business perspective rather than a technology perspective. Their focus was on meeting a business need rather than pushing technology. And implementation was excellent.”
As Corpnet analyzed the business, it became clear St Luke’s needed an infrastructure overhaul that would prepare it for the long term.
This meant moving away from a distributed architecture where every office was operating independently, to centrally delivering all core business applications from a separate co-located facility. All branches now run on a thin client architecture (limited processing takes place on the desktops), and all 24 locations can be managed from one central point.
Jonathan Pannell, Chief Technology Officer at Corpnet, says St Luke’s migrated from a mishmash of platforms, desktops, configurations and versions to a standard architecture based on the latest Microsoft products.
“As a systems integrator, we’ve noticed a dramatic maturing of all Microsoft’s product and feature sets, and its drive to create business value through combining the suite of products,” says Pannell.
“The combined value of Microsoft® Windows Server™, Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 is much more than the sum of the three parts.”
Says Ward: “We wanted to go with a single software vendor so we could put all our knowledge into one area. Microsoft applications are intuitive and functionally superior to other products. It was an easy choice—we stay aligned with industry standards and quality for not-for-profit pricing.”
Leaving Linux
Ward found St Luke’s had outgrown its ability to cope with an open source operating system.
“If I were going into a business that was small and needed a cheap solution for a file server, I’d deploy Linux,” he says. “But for anything more than four PCs, I’d definitely stick with Windows.
“The size of our organization meant it was not practical to deploy Linux. Support costs for Linux would be difficult to contain because Linux consultants are hard to come by, and expensive.
“When something went wrong in the old environment, it was difficult to diagnose the problem. If there was an issue I couldn’t fix, it would sometimes mean having to reformat the box and recover from tape—which is very labor intensive.
“Linux is cheaper when you consider the costs of licenses, but in terms of total cost of ownership, it’s difficult to say.”
Benefits
Moving all business applications to a central offsite facility meant St Luke’s reduced the risks associated with having all its records held on company premises. It also provided disaster recovery and back-up capability that, with tight integration with Microsoft software, enables real-time backup without the need for human intervention.
IT Support ‘On Call’ not ‘On Fire’
Coulton says the previous system had turned her IT team into firefighters rather than enabling them to be proactive or provide timely support to the branches.
“When there was a problem and we couldn’t get that IT support, it could affect how we did our business for the next few days,” she says.
A central helpdesk facility now provides a hotline for staff dealing with IT issues.
With a centrally maintained user environment, Ward has seen significant improvements in administration efficiency.
“I can add a user to the system in a couple of minutes,” he says, “whereas previously I would have had to travel out to a branch.
“I can upgrade information once at a central location rather than go to 23 sites. The Active Directory feature in Windows Server 2003 makes the maintenance of an entire user base seamless. It is the key to maintaining the whole user group.”
Painless User Adoption
Apart from an awareness course given to staff prior to rolling out Microsoft Office 2003, St Luke’s provided no training to more than 300 employees migrating from Microsoft Office 2000.
“All users have had a seamless transition,” says Coulton. “There have been a total of three calls to the helpdesk related to Office 2003 issues, which is less than one per cent.”
Ward agrees: “It is very user friendly. Our staff are pleased with the cosmetics of the product, and under the hood there are a lot of enhancements on Microsoft Office 2000.”
Ward says all software training and desktop support can now be done remotely from the central office.
“If a user is having trouble with Excel® and we’re having difficulty talking through the problem over the phone, we can mirror their PC wherever they are in the organization. We can see what they’re looking at and take control of their desktop if they consent. It is brilliant for training.”
Collaborating for Community Care
Staff productivity has improved with the collaboration tools in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. St Luke’s staff are sharing calendars, assigning tasks and scheduling appointments.
“From a management point of view I can collaborate more effectively with branches outside head office using the tools in Microsoft Outlook,” says Coulton.
“We’re scheduling teleconferences and videoconferences. I can see instantly who’s available using Outlook.”
Collaboration has even broader resonance for an organization like St Luke’s. The sharing of health information, and having a secure environment to transfer information, is a big issue for government.
Coulton says that, concerned with unnecessary duplication, government is focused on ensuring that members of the community do not receive the same assessments by every health provider they visit.
“They want that seamless chart that links people through their hospital to community services,” she says.
St Luke’s ability to collaborate with other community health providers, and meet increasing compliance requirements from government, will be critical to its success.
“We’re constantly looking at how we can use Web portals to access information and link into other service providers,” Coulton says. “It’s all about collaboration and partnership. Technology is such a vital part of community care to enable that to happen.”
St Luke’s is now looking at mobile technology for its army of field staff and volunteers.
“We’ve now got a solid infrastructure and that’s so important to us,” Coulton says. “We can now continue to look at ways technology can benefit our organization.”
5
Software and Services§ Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003
§ Microsoft Office 2003
§ Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000
§ Microsoft Active Directory®
§ Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
§ Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server
Hardware
§ IBM Blade Servers
§ IBM PCs
§ Wyse Thin Clients
Partners
§ Corpnet Business & Technology / Microsoft Windows Server System
Windows Server System™ is integrated server infrastructure software from Microsoft designed to support end-to-end solutions built on Windows Server 2003. It creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation: a whole-system design approach that helps simplify development, deployment and management. It is designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across an IT environment to reduce the costs of operations, deliver high reliability and security, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of a business.
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Corpnet’s products and services, call (07) 3010-7500 or visit the Web site at:
www.corpnet.com.au
For more information about St Luke’s Nursing Service, call (07) 3421-2855 or visit the Web site at:
www.stlukesnursing.org.au
© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft, Excel, Outlook, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.
Document published May 2005
6