WA Health renews outsourcing deal

Under the renewal, Fujitsu is prime-contracting to deliver an applications and infrastructure overhaul at the Department following the recommendations of a state Health Reform Committee last year. The new deal comes after reviews by Meta Group and the government of the parties' initial five-year deal which expired last month, the vendor said.

Fujitsu said the new work would also be managed through the InfoHealth Alliance -- a group established initially by DMR Consulting and the Department of Health in 2000 to manage information technology for the state health service. A Fujitsu spokesperson said the vendor -- which formally acquired DMR in April last year -- had renewed its sub-contracts with other alliance members ASG Group and ISA Technologies as part of the extension.

A release from the vendor said the contract extension would support activities such as consolidation of patient records from individual hospitals or health services to a central location, developing the role of secondary hospitals around the metropolitan area and providing new services such as 'hospital in the home'.

Dr Neale Fong, Western Australian Department of Health acting director-general, said the partnership would see "the continuation of high quality information and communications technology support being provided to the Department to June 2010".

Fujitsu said over the next five years it expected to reduce the resources allocated to support and maintenance and direct them to new projects in infrastructure and systems renewal.

Rod Vawdrey, the chief executive officer of Fujitsu Australia, said he expected the next five years would see lots of system refresh opportunities. A lot of the work would be in developing new patient administration systems, he said.