Royal Perth Hospital Case Study

Helping RPH deliver quality healthcare

Royal Perth Hospital is Western Australia's premier teaching hospital, providing a full range of emergency services for adults (except obstetrics) and serving as the State referral centre for many super-specialities.
The hospital treats about 73,000 in-patients a year, receives about 225,000 outpatient attendances a year, and has one of the busiest Emergency Departments in Australia, with more than 54,000 presentations a year.

Keeping Up with Change

Royal Perth Hospital first appointed ASG to undertake a technical architecture review of the hospital's computer infrastructure and information systems that were unreliable, superseded and needed immediate upgrading to a best practice environment.

The hospital's new IT Director recognised the importance and need to focus on the information management systems and appointed ASG to provide the expertise to upgrade and manage the systems as quickly as possible.

"The traditional self-sufficient maintenance of the IT department usually involves high overhead and personnel costs. Getting the right number and highly skilled staff is getting harder with the complexities of fluctuating project work within the hospital, ASG take care of all this and let's us focus on delivering solutions that support our core role of providing healthcare services" – Frank Gaglio, Director Information Services

The ASG Technical Architecture Review made a number of recommendations for improving the hospital's unstable infrastructure environment, consolidating the number of servers and at the same time resolved a number of Year 2000 compliance issues.

It took eight months and nine ASG staff members to stabilise the hospital's information systems environment and implement 'mission critical systems' required for hospital situations. 

All initiatives created relate to health care services, from the number of beds available in the hospital to doctor and nursing staff rosters.

ASG has designed, re-written and enhanced a number of systems including:

  • Switchboard system
  • BRAHAMS - Bed Management system
  • MERITS - Medical record tracking system
  • FIM - Functional impairment measurement tracking
  • TEDS - Production of Electronic Discharge Summaries

ASG also designed and developed a new system referred to as PAVLOVA that tracks how quickly and efficiently patients are handled within the hospital system.  This system is helping RPH continue the improvement of patient care and health care services.

GP Notify is another ASG initiative that automatically notifies general practitioners of a patient's condition. 

All these systems are designed, engineered and implemented to make hospital procedures more efficient and timely and enhance the health and safety of patient care.

Delivering Benefits

There is now a team of eleven fulltime ASG staff based at the hospital that manages the implementation of new information technology initiatives and continually improve, streamline and support the environment.  Subsequent phases will encourage the web enabling of the systems through a soon to be re-developed Intranet environment in the hospital.

ASG's projects and initiatives for Royal Perth Hospital have been highly successful and attracted substantial interest from other hospitals in Western Australia. Continued contract renewals are positive reinforcement of ASG's continuing high quality work for one of the most important industries in our community.