The initial project to bring together information from different data sources using different applications into one dashboard had failed, but the hospital was determined to achieve such a solution.

After a meeting with Brisbane-based NetOptions, a member of the Datacom group, the project to build a Web-based dashboard with open source components started in December 2005. Six months later the solution went live.

Datacom's lead architect, Craig Sargent, said by using powerful open source tools and processes like AJAX, MySQL and PHP it was able to design a solution that integrated with legacy and newer systems at the hospital.

Sargent said data integration is done with a mixture of flat file parsing and direct interfaces to data stores with PHP.

"All up, some 129 individual parameters are fed into the dashboard for real-time alerting," Sargent said. "We have given them a very powerful reporting and monitoring tool that has potential for use right throughout the Australian hospital system."