MercyAscot works with Umbrellar to drive digital transformation

“We wanted a long-term partnership with a provider who could offer thought leadership and support, to help us to digitally transform,” says Dr Geoff Sparkes, chief executive of MercyAscot Hospitals on why the organisation chose Umbrellar.

MercyAscot wanted to be able to focus on what it does best - caring for patients - and needed a partner that would focus on the critical applications and infrastructure that supports value-based, patient-centric care, says Sparkes.

“With Umbrellar we knew we had a local provider who understood our needs and who could help us grow to reach our potential. This isn’t just an IT project, it’s about digital transformation and an enduring partnership, one that we know will be good for both the organisation and for our patients.”

MercyAscot also recently acquired a Patient Administration and Electronic Medical Record solution TrakCare, provided by global EMR partners InterSystems.

The hospital team knew they needed to leverage cloud computing capabilities to deliver benefits in interoperability and potential long term scalability. They also needed a data platform with the capability to unlock actionable insights from patient data.  

“But in doing that we didn’t want to ship everything off to a server in the United States or Australia. We wanted a local operation with local support and for our crucial patient data to be stored locally,” says Sparkes.

Umbrellar worked with MercyAscot to architect the solution that will both deliver on the organisation’s current needs, and set them up for the long-term.

“Many software projects are about reducing cost, rationalising services and increasing capability,” says Umbrellar CEO Michael Foley.

“This one is fundamentally about improving outcomes for patients by focusing on what is valuable to them, and when we heard MercyAscot’s vision we knew we wanted to be part of that story.”

He says Umbrellar will be building an ‘infrastructure as a service’ model for MercyAscot that will see the cloud services company take over monitoring and management of applications and the network itself on a 24x7 basis.

In effect, Umbrellar will become the Network Operations Centre (NOC) for MercyAscot, he says.

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