Accenture wins Health data warehouse deal

HP servers chosen over mainframe.

The Department of Health and Ageing (DOHA) has awarded Accenture a $111 million contract to build an enterprise data warehouse to support the Government’s National Reform initiative.  

Signed on 22 December, 2011, the deal was not publicised until a report in The Australian yesterday. A spokeswoman for the Department told iTnews that “delivery is well underway".

The spokeswoman affirmed that the data warehouse will be hosted on a series of HP servers rather than a mainframe.

Accenture will provide the core IT platform and enterprise data warehouse (EDW) facilities for Independent Hospitals Pricing Authority, the National Health Performance Authority and the National Health Funding Body as well as Australia's Health department and the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care.

The deal forms only the first part of a very complex project. DOHA still needs to establish a specialist data warehousing and business intelligence panel. The RFT for that tender was also issued on 22 December, 2011.

According to public documents, the key deliverables of the National Health Reform Enterprise Data Warehouse Program was to:

• Build the ICT capability for national reform stakeholders;
• Build an ICT capability which is extensible over time to provide access to data to States and Territories and other agencies as part of health reform; and
• Ensure compliance with rigorous privacy and security standards.

The RFT closed on 30 January and an announcement on this new panel was expected to be made “in the next few weeks”, the spokeswoman said.