For the Provision of Unified Communications Infrastructure

⁠⁠⁠Loddon Mallee Rural Health Alliance (LMRHA) is one of five rural health alliances within Victoria. LMRHA includes 23 organisations made up of acute and community health members and customers that service a geographic area of approximately 25% of the Victorian landmass with a population of around 310,000 covering 58,678 square kilometres and across ten Local Government Authorities. Clients and patients also come from the New South Wales and South Australia border catchment areas.

LMRHA has operated under a Joint Venture Arrangement (JVA) agreement as developed by the now Department of Health and Human Services since July 2008. This agreement defines that the regional public health service should take on the role of Lead Agency in the JVA and that the Alliance should utilise the purchasing and procurement policies of the Lead Agency which in LMRHA’s case is BHCG. BHCG will manage the tender process.

LMRHA provides a number of core services to their member organisations. Voice over IP (VoIP) is one of the key shared services utilising a Cisco Unified Call Manager v9.1 platform. The current infrastructure is a centralised deployment housed at the Alliance’s data centre in Bendigo.

LMRHA are looking to build upon this deployment in order to provide full Unified Communications (UC) capability to all Alliance member organisations. This deployment will be utilising new Infrastructure and building upon our substantial investment in Cisco, by utilising CUCM v10.x as the base platform.
 
It is the intent to provide the core infrastructure and core capability initially, then work with each member, to understand how UC can be embedded in their “day to day” business processes.