Townsville University Hospital undergoes full digital transformation

Townsville University Hospital (TUH) is the tertiary referral hospital for Townsville Hospital and Health Service (HHS), supporting a population of almost 250,000 people across Northern Queensland — including isolated Indigenous communities.

The hospital and health service treats about 355 patients in its emergency departments, 1188 patients through its outpatient clinics and about 38 people in the operating theatres, as well as discharging about 298 inpatients per day. Due to the region’s geographical diversity, the TUH IT team had a goal to be aligned with the hospital’s strategy — to enable the Townsville region access to world-class health care regardless of their geographic location.

Previously, TUH relied on older technologies that did not harness the latest in storage innovation. As a result, the dashboards used in the wards had low reload times and obtaining accurate medical histories was a slow process because patient records had to be found and manually updated.

Now, with Dell Technologies’ low-latency and high-input/output operations per second (IOPS) storage running TUH’s data lake, the foundation of its ward management and patient flow reporting systems, staff can perform near real-time reporting instead of batch processing, improving efficiency and access to current information.

The Dell Technologies storage solutions empowering TUH

After testing against other vendors, TUH chose Dell Technologies storage solutions, including Dell PowerStore 5000T and Dell PowerScale, for their performance, redundancy, scalability and flexibility. The new solutions enable TUH to leverage industry-leading infrastructure to support healthcare solutions with a focus on delivering positive patient outcomes.

Dell PowerStore is leveraged as the single storage platform for the provision of block-based storage and data lake to support the mixed workloads run in the hospital. The new smart storage system has significantly reduced the time it takes to manage the system, so that the IT team can focus on improving the digitisation of health care across the hospital.

At the same time, the hospital has seen significant growth in clinical media from pathology, microbiology, cardiology and sleep studies, as well as increased requirements such as the storage of CCTV over a long retention period. TUH has implemented Dell PowerScale, which provides a single repository for unstructured data leveraging a highly available and cost-effective architecture.

Together, Dell PowerStore and Dell PowerScale provide TUH additional performance, improved redundancy, scalability and flexibility. These improvements are critical for TUH to deliver world-class health care in a regional location while keeping pace with the constantly changing digital environment. This technology solution represents the first step toward digital transformation for TUH and Townsville HHS.

Improving the healthcare journey with digital solutions

Barry Koch, Director of Information Technology Services Digital Health and Knowledge at Townsville HHS, says Dell Technologies’ solutions have been integral to the hospital’s digital transformation.

“Dell Technologies has provided a collaborative and health-centric solution in a complex environment to support our patients’, clinicians’ and staff’s digital journey, and are integral to the hospital’s digital transformation by understanding and partnering with the health service.”

Koch is excited about what Dell Technologies’ solutions can offer, both for TUH and other providers looking to model their services on TUH’s success.

“We want to be the leader of health care in the northern region of Queensland. It’s a blank canvas at the moment; we can implement change in an agile fashion using scalable solutions that Dell Technologies is continually innovating,” he said.

Image credit: iStock.com/ipopba