A nationwide drive to upgrade its existing IT infrastructure has enhanced performance at various National Health Laboratory Services (NHLS) centres.
As official hardware supplier to this medical fraternity, Datacentrix equipped NHLS laboratories at Grootte Schuur, Chris Hani Baragwanath and the Red Cross Children`s hospital, among others, with 250 new desktop computers.
According to an NHLS spokesperson, the Cape Town laboratories were hampered by the use of dated equipment.
"Red Cross Children`s hospital, Tygerberg and Grootte Schuur were all still running DOS on 486s, thus we needed upgraded desktops. We also had to change from using IPX protocol to IP protocol. Dated servers at Tygerberg were replaced with a Compaq ML370, while Red Cross Children`s Hospital received a Novell based file server."
Provision of a three-year warranty was crucial for NHLS. "We do not have a substantial IT support infrastructure in the Cape Town area, thus we had to acquire equipment that is reliable. Also, should something go wrong we could count on Datacentrix to assist us," explains the spokesperson.
Given the complexity of the nationwide hardware implementation, one of the biggest challenges faced by NHLS centred on the distances between the different centres.
"We have a core IT support team that was spread very thin during the roll-out, as these were all fairly large implementations. At most of the sites, the implementations had to be done fairly quickly, ensuring minimal downtime and disruption of standard services," comments the spokesperson.
Datacentrix was also involved with the network project at Chris Hani Baragwanath, where it assisted NHLS` IT team with the replacement of the existing backbone.
Says Dion Visagie, business unit manager at Datacentrix: "Both the wards and laboratories at this hospital are situated quite a distance from the backbone infrastructure, which resulted in some networking concerns. Datacentrix did an assessment at the hospital in July, suggested a solution to NHLS and then later implemented the solution, ensuring minimal downtime and optimal networking ability."
Newly acquired NHLS notebooks are being used by its IT support personnel, while all desktops are used within the various laboratories. Once a new sample arrives at the laboratory for testing, it is registered on the database, the test is done, the results are stored in the database and then it is delivered to the appropriate patient or doctor.
Visagie says Datacentrix simplified roll-out at each of these centres by preloading images onto all the desktops. "In a sensitive computing environment such as that of NHLS, our objective was to minimise any system impact and ensure a smooth and rapid transition."
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