SWARH: Efficiently Delivering on Customer Healthcare Projects with Hordern IT
Background
SWARH is the provider of key infrastructure and IT services for hospitals in the Southwest Alliance for Regional Health. SWARH is responsible for supporting customer innovation projects, effectively resolving incidents and ensuring uptime across critical applications and systems for its member healthcare providers.
The Challenge
As the provider of key infrastructure and services for 15 member hospitals, rapid advancements in the technology landscape and opportunities to access leading edge health systems, was placing enormous loads on SWARH’s systems and people.
To effectively deliver core services and support new projects SWARH needed the ability to easily and efficiently scale its workforce with people who had the organisational and technical knowledge to hit the ground running.
SWARH needed a trusted IT partner that could deliver technical resources to support critical projects with little to no training or upskilling.
Solution
SWARH approached Hordern IT whose team of IT professionals are highly skilled in an array of technologies, to support a range of different environments and applications across the member organisations. SWARH needed technical staff who could complete set tasks or join project teams when full time staff needed to focus on other responsibilities.
Hordern IT worked with SWARH to build a partnership and knowledge of the organisation and systems over the years so that they could step in when needed. They supplied resources who could slot into existing team structures and work methods to complete project work while not having to manage everyday tasks.
Hordern staff work both on-site and remotely on SWARH project management teams as well as dealing directly with technology stakeholders from member organisations for feedback and training.
Hordern resources provide technical skills including:
- maintaining the codebase of an internal application and deploying both bugfix and feature releases.
- overhauling database schemas to reduce memory and IO requirements to greatly improve application response times and reduce server resource requirements
- performing complex server migrations to modernise and remove legacy environments
- creation of automation scripts to create repeatable administration actions and reduce administrator workloads
- creation of documentation to ensure knowledge is not lost at the end of the engagement
Using HordernIT allows SWARH to scale its resources as needed to efficiently complete focused project work without the need to train, upskill or induct new staff. It also allows existing staff to focus on their usual workload, thereby not disrupting business as usual processes.
Establishing an ongoing relationship between HordernIT and SWARH means that knowledge will accumulate over time and lead to even greater efficiency as time goes on. This is in contrast to using a “temp” style approach where the knowledge is reset between each engagement
