Addressing the challenge of healthcare down under
Healthcare is clearly rising up the public agenda in multiple countries around the world, and Australia and New Zealand are no exceptions. Last week during the deluge of Cisco Networkers activities in Brisbane, the media were taken to see one of Cisco’s healthcare customers in action – Mater Health services. Mater Health Services is Queensland’s largest not-for-profit hospital group, and is making significant strides in achieving its Smart Hospital strategy with a roll-out of an expanded suite of business applications on its Cisco Medical-Grade Network across its seven modern hospitals.
Here, Ken Boal, director of Public Sector, Cisco Australia and New Zealand talks to us outside the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, immediately after our media conference on site.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APL7_PSrngs
Mater Health Services is continually developing new methods and practices to improve outcomes for the more than 500,000 patients it cares for annually and to enhance the medical working environment of more than 6,000 staff.
Around the world, Cisco has been working with a number of key organisations to pioneering new approaches to health care that make services more readily available to patients in convenient locations. New Zealand’s West Coast District Health Board has been piloting HealtPresence as a way to extend the natural reach of its services. We’ve been gathering clinical data from trials of this solution in Aberdeen in Scotland and San Jose in California and the results indicated that 90 percent of participants felt satisfied with a remote care experience and would recommend it to others. You can read more about the trials here and see a demo of the solution in action.
We have a wealth of written and video content from Cisco Networkers last week - if you haven’t already please check out our Newsroom in ANZ - http://newsroom.cisco.com/ANZ (click through to the Cisco Networkers section).
And we also need your help for a final push from the Aussies to get to 100 followers for our ANZ vice president Les Williamson - Les is almost there with 90 followers now: http://twitter.com/leswilli. Get a feeling for attendees perspectives on the show here as well via the Cisco Networkers twitter feed #cnw09. We hope you enjoyed the experience and look forward to seeing you next year!
Posted by Marc Musgrove at 12:50PM PST
Marc Musgrove
Global PR Manager
Jason Deign Oct 7, 2009
For those interested in the subject, there is also an interview with Mal Thatcher, CIO of Mater Health Services, on News@Cisco at http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/ts_093009.html.