Friday March 14, 2025
For over 22 years, Chief Information Officer Suma Shivalingaiah, has worked in various sectors during her career in Information Technology, but feels she’s making the greatest difference at Eastern Health.
“Health is a very complex field with multiple areas of development. There’s more satisfaction working in the health sector, you’re giving more to society,” she said.
Ms Shivalingaiah and her team have been working on their strategy to enhance various facets of ICT including a number of cyber security initiatives, completing the network uplift program, and the M365 roll out.
“With various modernisation projects now complete, we are considering how to get digital dividends back to the consumers and the stakeholders.
“We’re also supporting the Electronic Medical Record mobility and extension program, along with the care synergy and care exchange work that we’re doing for the Department of Health,” she said.
The Victorian Department of Health runs the CareSync program; an initiative linking health information between health services. Ms Shivalingaiah is excited about the collaborative work Eastern Health is contributing to the project,
“Care synergy is basically multiple streams of work. One of the streams of work that we’re looking after is the integration, and where we can actually do referrals and exchange referral information between health professionals such asdoctors,” she said.
In ongoing efforts to continuously optimise resources and make the consumer’s experience in our service more efficient, the ICT team is also exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
“We’re working through a governance framework, where we look at all the different types of AI use-cases, which tools are available and stakeholders are wanting to use, and assess that with our cyber security risks. Ultimately we provide recommendations of using the most suitable AI solution.
“There are ample opportunities in this area, which is really exciting,” Ms Shivalingaiah said.