Western Health in Victoria has engaged IT solutions and managed services provider Logicalis Australia to separate and rebuild its old identity management system which it shared with two other major hospitals.

The health service manages four acute public hospitals – Sunshine Hospital, Footscray Hospital, Williamstown Hospital and Bacchus Marsh, as well as some community-based care services.

WHY IT MATTERS

Western Health had to quickly tackle the rapid changes brought by the global pandemic. It had to swiftly transition to remote work, redirect its resources to establish a vaccination hub, and at one point, manage nursing homes. Prior to the pandemic, it was fast growing as a healthcare provider, onboarding 3,000 new staff within a year, and was about to embark on a major merger project with Djerriwarrh Health Services. 

Amid all this, Western Health tapped Logicalis to rework its old identity management system, which it saw as a "major impediment" to its merger. The system, which was based on Microsoft Active Directory, manages identity, authentication and authorisation for all users of its network and IT resources.

With an upgraded system, Western Health is now "well positioned to further modernise its operations, especially the digital workplace". 

It also has a "significantly improved security posture," according to Sam Psathas, healthcare sector lead for Logicalis Australia. Its identity system for onboarding and offboarding staff works instantaneously; it now has a single sign-on and allows one identity for all internal systems, removing the need to have multiple user IDs and passwords.

Cameron McBride, Western Health's Director of Digital Technology Services, said Logicalis has helped alleviate the pressure on staff while they work their way around providing care in a remote-based setting.

THE LARGER TREND

Another Victoria-based public healthcare provider, Peninsula Health, has also recently engaged Logicalis to deploy the Citrix Workspace, which becomes the foundation for its provision of telemedicine services amid the ongoing pandemic. Logicalis has also enabled work-from-home arrangements for the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.