I went up to London to hear a very interesting Healthcare presentation hosted by HP about the transformation and migration of a hospital’s IT system. You’ll want to learn more about the benefits and advantages as well as the partnerships that made it practical.
A Lights-Out Wake-Up Call
Luton and Dunstable is a mid-sized acute hospital with 650 beds and 3,500 staff with the best performing Accident and Emergence department in the UK. It’s in the process of being upgraded as a trauma site. However it invests far less than the 3.2% of funding UK hospitals spend on IT.
When a power cut turned off the hospital’s lights and data centre – a major wake-up call requiring big changes – it turned to Philippa Graves to sort things out. Now COO and Head of Strategy, she’s not a typical IT manager, coming from a clinical background – ‘radiography, MRI scanning – I’ve done everything’ she says. Her new role was to find a strategy to sort things out.
When she took a look at the data centre she found water dripping, trailing wires, ‘I can’t tell you how awful it was. I’ve never seen a department that needed transforming more, despite looking OK on the outside’ she told us. To make things worse the hospital is situated on a really old site – a challenging environment for its more than 80 clinical and IT systems. Her experience told her how important it is for patient care to extend data communications, believing that (amongst other things) it’s important for consultants to be able to read vital signs from home – and poignant perhaps giving the frequent glimpses she gave to her red smart phone during the presentation.
Transformation and Migration with OCSL
As well as acquiring new servers and storage the hospital’s transformation programme involved strengthening resilience and adding both a mirrored data centre and a new 24×7 managed infrastructure service. It has introduced an embedded change management service and a scheduled/preventative maintenance programme. It chose Microsoft, Broadcom, Intel and HP as its systems suppliers.
It turned to Cloud Service Provider and HP Platinum partner OCSL for help with transformation and migration. OCSL is a 25-year old private company with around 300 staff, revenues of roughly £75m. Healthcare is one area of its industry expertise – over the last 8 years it’s succeeded in selling services to about 100 of the 500 hospital trusts in the country. Its resources include Tier III data centres located in Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire. However it doesn’t work on a billable-hours basis in Healthcare and makes a smaller profit margin here than elsewhere.
To implement the changes Philippa took all the IT systems (140 servers running 80 major applications) down over a weekend giving a maximum of 3 hours downtime for the ‘priority 1’ systems running the 12 most important applications. During this time the hospital stayed open handling a major incident. All the systems were brought back successfully with no impact on patients and no breaches during downtime. IT and OCSL led and delivered project – bringing things up in parallel. Philippa noted ‘It’s a true partnership – it helps us do things we’re not good at’.
The benefits are more reliable systems and better communications between the hospital’s 2k mobile devices, 5k medical quality devices and CAD. Her Cloud service with OCSL means she can also order more storage on the fly rather than paying for a big ‘repository that I didn’t fill up until the end of the year’.
HP Helion and the Cloud 28+ Service Catalogue
HP is attempting to keep its partners with it as the emphasis of its offerings move from hardware to the Cloud. Munir Ismet noted ‘the Cloud is like a F1 racing car – it’s useless without a driver – why companies like OCSL are so important to us in Healthcare’. It also encourages its European Helion partners to participate in Cloud 28+, which is ‘a single European Cloud service catalogue for data centers based in the EU and working with the variations in data location standards in each of the 28 member states’.
When partnering the hospital had little choice of hardware supplier as OCSL is a dyed-in-the-wool HP partner. It was involved in alpha and beta testing Helion Cloud solutions from January before their launch back in May 2014. It’s early days for Helion and Cloud 28+ for OCSL, but Iain Moberley reports ‘a South African healthcare company now wants to work with us and a German ISV wants to put it on their platform as well’.
Some Conclusions – Can Government-owned Hospitals invest in IT?
Healthcare is not the most highly funded sectors of the IT industry, even if it’s growing (see Figure). Iain confirmed this, saying ‘L&D is under-resourced – they just don’t have the money – it’s a challenge to me as a Systems Integrator, to HP and to Philippa’s team’. In the event Philippa paid for the new system by using funds from an unlinked budget and wins supporters by reducing the obvious risk of things going wrong again and by proving the utility of the new connected solutions.
The consequences of having the best-rated Accident and Emergency department is more patients – not more funding unfortunately and – unlike a business – it’s not possible for a hospital to achieve a traditional ROI. Perhaps better are the outcomes of improved recovery rates, shorter hospital stays and better information and IT experiences for employees and patients alike. Philippa’s understanding of medical processes and her enthusiasm for the way technology can improve the working of her hospital makes this transformation project a success in any case. I definitely agree with Munir who said ‘we need more Philippas in Healthcare.’