Healius Critical Infrastructure

When lives are impacted by every decision, infrastructure failures are not an option. 

Healius, one of Australia’s largest healthcare providers, manages a network of 18 businesses, with over 2000 pathology laboratories, 150 imaging centres and 14 hospitals, serving millions of patients through well-known brands like Laverty, Dorevitch, QML and WDP. With such a critical role in Australia’s healthcare system, reliable and high-performing technology is essential. 

Transforming Critical Infrastructure to Future-Proof Healius

As their business continued to evolve, Healius faced mounting challenges: performance issues in critical systems and increasing demands on their infrastructure driven by healthcare digitisation. Recognising the need to address these issues, Healius’s technology leadership team engaged VECTEC for a second opinion on their proposed approach to infrastructure renewal. 

“We were hamstrung before we started this digital transformation,” said Alex Larson, CIO of Healius. “Our old hyper-converged infrastructure was failing, and with the increasing reliance on AI-powered diagnostics, we needed a solution that could scale with us.”

Providing A Fresh Perspective

Healius’s internal architecture team had identified their aging hyper-converged platform as a potential bottleneck and proposed replacing it with an updated version of the same technology. This was a reasonable path forward, and Healius leadership sought to validate their approach, given the scale and criticality of the systems involved. 

“We were hamstrung before we started this digital transformation,” said Alex Larson, CIO of Healius. “Our old hyper-converged infrastructure was failing, and with the increasing reliance on AI-powered diagnostics, we needed a solution that could scale with us.”

When Healius shared their plans, VECTEC identified potential risks and opportunities for improvement: 

1. The planned solution risked locking Healius into technology that could struggle to meet growing data and performance demands. 
2. Healthcare workloads, particularly those involving medical imaging, require storage solutions that can handle rapid data growth and high-resolution requirements. 
3. A more flexible and scalable architecture could deliver better outcomes while future-proofing the business against industry shifts. 

Collaborating for Success

Understanding every business has unique needs, rather than focusing solely on technology, VECTEC. Needed to ensure the solution aligned with their operational priorities and strategic goals. 

Assessment of the business, environment & needs

Led by our in-house infrastructure consultants, we conducted a comprehensive review of Healius’s operations, critical applications and long-term scalability requirements. 

Market Analysis & Technology Benchmarking

We evaluated three solutions across a large number of criteria based on Healius’s needs and market-wide use cases. Assessing the initial proposed hyper-converged solution found that this would fail to meet their needs, providing detailed insights into the risks it posed, as well as proposing alternative market leading technologies not previously considered by Healius.

Tailored Recommendation & Technology Roadmap

Backed by data, needs analysis and technology benchmarking process, VECTEC recommended a future-ready architecture, with tiered storage by NetApp, fit for their specific needs and their plans to scale

Resilient and Ready for the Future

With VECTEC’s expertise and partnership, Healius avoided unnecessary spending and achieved transformative outcomes previously did not consider possible: 

• Informed Strategy: Armed with a clear, data-driven roadmap, Healius could confidently navigate the market, guiding their infrastructure decisions
• Future-Ready AI adoption and Scalability: The NetApp solution proposed by VECTEC was able to position Healius for growth regardless of how their business evolves.

• 10X Faster Patient Diagnosis: Critical systems now operate with the reliability required to support patient care

• Significant cost savings  of up to $10 Million compared to their initial plan

A Shared Commitment to Excellence

“At Healius, our mission is to deliver exceptional healthcare outcomes, and our technology must reflect that commitment. Partnering with VECTEC gave us the confidence to make informed decisions about our infrastructure foundations and enhance our strategy, leading us to the solution that supports both current needs and future growth,” said Alex Larson, Chief Technology Officer, Healius.

VECTEC’s consulting-led, technology-agnostic approach helped Healius shift from a legacy-constrained model to a modern, high-performance architecture, demonstrating the strategic role IT infrastructure plays in enabling innovation.