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IBM widened its footprint in supporting the healthcare IT market of Singapore with the signing of a major IT outsourcing contract with National Healthcare Group (NHG). The contract demonstrates the close collaboration between both organizations in which IBM is also the provider of application and infrastructure management services for NHG's financial, material and patient management systems running on SAP and J2EE applications.
NHG owns and manages an integrated healthcare delivery network, providing a complete range of healthcare services from outpatient medical consultations and surgeries to diagnostic services. For this IT outsourcing contract, IBM will provide NHG with consolidated IT helpdesk services, onsite support, IT asset management and tracking services and server operations, as well as management services.
The five-year contract covers 11,000 employees working across four hospitals - Alexandra Hospital, National University Hospital, Tan Tock Seng Hospital and the Institute of Mental Health; three specialty institutes - The Cancer Institute, The Eye Institute and The Heart Institute; as well as four business divisions.
Besides covering two data centres with more than 200 servers and a computer network with a total of more than 8,000 PCs, IBM will also provide server operations and management services for NHG's data centres and satellite data centres, which reside at NHG's hospitals, poly clinics, medical centres and business divisions.
Through the partnership, NHG hopes to leverage IBM's IT operations capabilities so that the IT infrastructure upon which NHG deploys its applications can be 'taken for granted'. "As we use IT more and more in our hospitals and clinics, it is important that our doctors and nurses are not interrupted by system slowdowns or failures . . . That way they can get to the patient information they need, order the drugs that are required, quickly and efficiently, and focus on providing care to our patients," said Linus Tham, CIO, NHG.
IBM Singapore Managing Director Patricia Yim said the helpdesk services will take an end-to-end deployment approach. "Built upon IBM's global deployment frameworks which has been successfully deployed with other clients, the end-to-end deployment approach will assist the NHG IT team in easing the IT support services to the doctors and nurses so that they can focus on providing care to their patients."
With an IT environment as reliable as utilities, NHG's medical staff can look towards providing quality patient care within a healthcare environment that is accessible and seamless.
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