Beaumont Hospital has made a substantial investment in ICT over the last decade. It now hosts a large virtualised private cloud infrastructure in its own data centre, supporting 1,800 PC workstations and a current total of over 5,000 authorised passwords for staff and other users. It is Wi-Fi enabled throughout, with internet access for patients and visitors, and a Separate secure network for staff.
“We have a bring your own device (BYOD) policy for staff, with doctors currently favouring iPads.” said Martin McCormack, ICT director. “On the infrastructure side, we have been building for the national strategy that will group hospitals as a combined resource and we have St Joseph’s and some other sites anyway. So we have a robust, high performance network essential with very large diagnostic images being viewed in different places.”
Beaumont moved to a VMware virtual desktop with encryption for all users. Doctors can work through iPads on the move or in fact any type of computer from anywhere in the world, thin client touchscreens are on trial in the hospital, and yet all patient data remains secure in the data centre.