This year at Cisco Live in Melbourne, we were lucky enough to visit St. Vincent's Hospital in Melbourne to get an overview of the hospital's IT strategy and to see some of the technology in action.  Simon Richardson, the CIO for St Vincent's Health Melbourne, and his team talked us through the hospital's three main initiatives:

Providing Anywhere, Anytime Access for Physicians with Quick Connect

• St. Vincent's is providing "Physician Mobility" to its medical staff with Quick Connect. With a quick tap of a card, medical staff have immediate access to clinical applications from 600 desktops and Computers on Wheels (COWS) throughout the hospital. Based on the Cisco Unified Computing System, Quick Connect means that multiple staff can access records at the same time across the hospital's multiple sites. Staff only need to log on once at the start of the day and can then simply tap their card for subsequent log-ins, wherever they may be. With staff logging on to computers 50 to 60 times a day, this is a huge time savings.

Improving Access to Critical Patient Data with Medical Records Online

• Medical Records Online (MRO) enables St. Vincent's to communicate patient information to healthcare professionals who need it, whether they are at the patient's bedside or across campus. Within the first 12 months of operation, MRO has accumulated over 2.2 million scanned documents and is improving the availability and accessibility of clinical information. Based on Cisco WLAN, LAN and WAN network, it's also the first step on the long journey towards an EMR (Electronic Medical Records).

Meeting Demanding Mission-Critical Conditions with Greater Data Centre Reliability and Availability

• We were taken around St. Vincent's data centre which is the backbone of the hospital's ICT, delivering the highest available uptime, scalability and performance. The team explained how frequent tests of disaster recovery are conducted, producing predictable and stable test results.

St. Vincent's Health Melbourne is absolutely committed to improving clinical operations through the use of collaboration, mobility and investments in a patient-centric clinical model. It was great to see some of the technology in action that is helping the hospital in this quest.