Statewide Telehealth Service - Core Infrastructure Upgrade

The Statewide Telehealth Service (STS) oversees the enabling and support of telehealth services and technology across the public sector in Western Australia. The STS operates out of the WA Country Health Service (WACHS) but has a state-wide responsibility. STS provides the telehealth network across WA Health including WACHS, metropolitan Health Service Providers, Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and other Government agencies.

The current videoconferencing environment has approximately 820 hardware endpoints (predominately Polycom) and a software client (desktop and mobile devices) widely distributed across the state. The existing Core Infrastructure is an Avaya product and WACHS requires the supply of additional Avaya videoconferencing related hardware and software required to stabilize and upgrade the current Core Infrastructure.

This core infrastructure upgrade is to rectify the following issues:

- capacity constraints during peak periods that impact the availability and quality of service;

- the use of this infrastructure to deliver 24/7 clinical services for which it was not originally architected, resulting in the available maintenance and support windows being reduced; and

- functionality that currently cannot be deployed due to the reliance on hardware rather than virtual servers.