Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust (NLaG) provides acute hospital and community services to around 350,000 people. They have 850 beds across 3 hospitals in Grimsby, Scunthorpe and Goole and employ around 6,500 staff across acute, primary and social care settings. The WebV team had developed a cost effective Electronic Patient Record and Clinical Software Solution to meet the needs of the NLaG Trust and the system has since been deployed across a range of other healthcare organisations including 5 acute hospitals, 5 CCGs and 12 community organisations.
In early April 2020, at the start of Covid-19, Norwich and Norfolk Trust asked WebV to replace their paper-based patient records with the WebV EPR system ‘in the shortest timescale possible’. The Norwich and Norfolk Trust had already planned to digitise their paper records, but with the Covid-19 pandemic accelerating, their paper-based system was considered an additional risk for virus transmission and remote-access to patient data was critical. Their plans were accelerated and the WebV team needed to turn around a solution in a very short space of time to allow staff to access digitised patient records across different settings including working from home.
Norwich and Norfolk Trust opted for a cloud solution and needed 2 application servers and 2 database servers to be deployed to host the WebV solution and the patient record database. With the IT team within NLAG extremely busy responding to the pandemic, WebV turned to Redcentric to put a solution in place.
Matthew Bovingdon, Head of WebV, Operations and Product Manager, said
“We chose to work with Redcentric to set up the IaaS platform to provide hosted servers because they were already the HSCN partner for the NLaG Trust, we knew them and trusted them.”
Key requirements for the solution were to:
The Redcentric IaaS platform took the risk and responsibility away from our customer and ourselves freeing up our resources. And the speed at which the managed servers were set up helped us a great deal at a point in time when our IT team were exceptionally busy dealing with our Covid-19 response
Redcentric was able to respond to the requirement very quickly. Tim Hughes said, “Redcentric configured and delivered our IaaS platform in less than half the time of another supplier who we had previously used. They were very responsive and having a dedicated Account Manager at this early stage was extremely helpful as it meant we always had a central point of contact supporting us throughout the deployment.” This could not have been achieved by the internal IT team who were extremely busy with the Covid response. While there were some challenges along the way, mainly due to the need to put a service in place with very little planning time, the two teams worked together to identify the right IP addresses to connect to at the Norwich Hospital to give the right level of access. Set up of the Redcentric customer portal for Norwich and Norfolk, which needed to be completely separate to the NLaG customer portal, needed to be completed within the same timeframe as the service was being put in place and this was achieved in parallel.
Tim Hughes, WebV Business Development & Contracts Officer, said,
“We were impressed with the speed with which Redcentric responded and turned around the IaaS platform, having initially agreed a 10 day turnaround to set up our hosted servers, they then achieved it in less than 6 days. It really showed their commitment to getting a solution in place at this critical time”
The Redcentric IaaS platform provides a quick and easy route to deploying a solution at speed and removes risk and responsibility for customers. Tim Hughes said, “The Redcentric managed service is an offering which is very attractive to us for the future as it provides us with additional capacity to support new customers which will enable us to easily scale and grow while we are free to focus on our WebV solution and meeting new customer needs.
The service levels which Redcentric can offer means we’ve got a guaranteed level of 99.99% uptime, which coupled with our usual failover measures means exceptionally high levels of availability and peace of mind for our customer.”
