Information Communication Technology/Information Management

North & West Primary Health Care has provided quality IT support to rural and remote GP’s in north and west Queensland since 1998. This service was introduced as an innovative approach to enhancing GP support of primary health care to assist GP’s with their practices and nurse educator services for both GP’s and patients.
Our organization adopts a Place Management model which makes our service geographically accessible to rural and remote areas by way of IT support services from each of our region’s offices.
Our IT team have specialized expertise in General Practice Information Management & Technology systems and are all qualified IT technicians in the broader field of the Information technology sector.

GP support is covered by our Information and Communications Technology Support Officers at each of our region’s offices. Government Funding of IT services to General Practices ceased several years ago but NWQPHC has continued providing this service at little or no cost to the General Practices within its geographical area
To ensure that IT services to General Practice are maintained both now and in the future NWQPHC requires an Information Service Level Agreement(see website for copy) to be signed to ensure the sustainability of the IT services provided to its members.
Our IT services comprise of a three-tier technical support system, meaning a system that has three distinct levels of support. The reason for providing a multi-tiered support system instead of one general support group is to provide the best possible service in the most efficient and cost effective manner.
Success of the organizational structure is dependent on the technicians’ understanding of their level of responsibility and commitments, their customer response time commitments, and when to appropriately escalate an issue and to which level.

Tier 1 - This is the initial support level responsible for basic customer issues. This includes a First Level helpdesk for basic support requests that have a resolution time of less than 1 hour. There is also a Second level helpdesk which is advanced support for major application and system outages which have a resolution time of between 2 – 5 hours. Both levels are delivered over the telephone, by email or via remote access across the internet with our technicians.


Tier 2 – This level of support is aimed towards creation of System documentation, system design and formulation of ICT Disaster recovery plans . Resolution times here are generally two weeks and the work is carried out remotely unless a Practice visit is requested.
Tier3 – Support escalated to Tier 3 is normally due to problems that cannot be resolved over the telephone or remotely and requires a technician to visit the practice. Resolution times on this tier cannot be set and is dealt with on a case by case basis.
This level also covers out of hours support and emergency ICT Assistance as described in SLA agreement.
Our services include:
• Helpdesk support from 8.30am - 5pm Monday to Friday.
• Support of the GP Access After Hours agreed as per IT Service level Agreement
• Systems support (networks, servers, operating systems, Printers, backups, ADSL Routers)
• Installation and ongoing assistance with practice management\clinical assessment software (Pracsoft, MD2, MD3, Genie, Best Practice etc)
• Pathology result and Medicare Lodgement software
• Secure Messaging Software (Healthlink, Fetch,Medical Objects,Argus)
• Remote access facilities and remote support
• Security and preventative maintenance services
• Disaster Recovery

For further enquiries please contact the ICT Team Leader on 07 4725 8868

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