Counties Manukau and Waitemata district health boards are consolidating their email and operating systems and implementing systems management tools.
The infrastructure rationalisation exercise, named Project Fusion, began in June and is scheduled to finish next April. By then both DHBs will be using Microsoft Exchange 2003 for email and will run Windows XP and Office 2000 on the desktop and Windows Server 2003 at the back end.
Project Fusion is being run by healthAlliance, the body set up to provide shared services in IT and other areas for the two DHBs.
HealthAlliance IS manager Joanne Bos says Project Fusion is purely an infrastructure project and doesn’t extend to sharing applications. That is being addressed separately within healthAlliance, with examples including shared use of the PiMS patient management system and Oracle financials.
It will, however, provide the platform for consolidation of further applications, such as those used in the pharmacy, radio-graphy and other departments.
The new environment will make use of Microsoft tools such as System Management Server, Operations Manager and Automated Provisioning Framework. It will be enabled for Microsoft’s .Net development framework.
“We’re not in the application development business and have no plans to develop our own applications, but .Net gives us a good starting point for what’s coming our way. More and more vendors are going the .Net way and we want to be able to take advantage of that.”
After the server and desktop environment are standardised, the next step will be server consolidation, Bos says.
Hewlett-Packard is providing project management and some technical consultancy services for Project Fusion.v