Case Study: University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust

Speed and resilience

Kcom has worked successfully with University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay Trust on the design and delivery of all major IT projects for more than a decade. The early days saw the implementation of a new LAN and WAN; following this an expansion of the storage solution; introduction of a GP out of hours service; and most recently a wireless infrastructure designed to support multiple new applications. These enabled significant improvements to patient services as well as major time and cost savings. 

Lee Coward, ICT Manager explained, “With a separate LAN at each site and a WAN joining them up, we were keen to consolidate and create one data centre for best practice purposes and economy of scale. There were concerns over safety, efficiency and resilience; it was vital that critical patient administration, X-ray and major scans and radiology booking systems stayed online at all times.”

The decision was made to centralise systems within two computer rooms for resilience and where power supply could be more or less guaranteed.  The Cisco based WAN has been through threeiterations, progressing to100 Mbps as it became saturated. The faster WAN has created huge efficiency gains and enabled implementation of call centres to support new services including a ‘GP out of hours’ service.

“All 58 GP practices were responsible for their own on-call doctor system, resulting in a variety of administration issues as well as the additional work pressure for those doctors on call. The high speed WAN meant that we were able to centralise the system into a single IP Contact Centre. The contact centre staff offer advice over the phone where possible, set up call backs or get a doctor out to patients when required. It is a huge improvement in terms of cost and time savings but most importantly to patient service.” 

Storage for life

Kcom also provided the EMC based storage infrastructure to the Trust, at first with a single storage array and then adding a second which among other things has enabled the introduction of a new application to support cancer treatments.

“Historically chemotherapy drugs were prepared in advance of patient appointments. If the consultants wanted to alter the prescription these treatments were wasted, and patients were sent away while a new treatment was prepared. The new application enables prescriptions to be prepared real-time, and facilitates online signatures if consultants are not in the immediate vicinity. This saves time, drug wastage and helps make what can be a difficult time slightly easier for patients.” 

A Wireless Future

The introduction of the ‘Improving Working Lives’ government Directive and a recognition of cost inefficiencies for doctors on-call, led to the Trust’s decision to put in place the first building blocks of a wireless infrastructure, starting with a new application called ‘ibleep’.

“Previously, when a nurse required a doctor they simply bleeped them directly, with a fast bleep for extreme cases and a ‘crash’ bleep to flag critical situations. There was no other level of prioritisation or way of providing detail; doctors had to respond to all bleeps. What ibleep is able to do is give nursing staff the ability to add information and traffic light the call against priority criteria, which is then assessed and passed on to the most appropriate doctor.”

“The real benefit of ibleep is that patients see the right doctor/nurse for their specific problem and that the doctors are aware of clinical priority. Also the ‘bleeping staff’ can see when the doctor has read the message, is on the way, has reached the bedside and when the episode is completed. This also provides a useful audit trail for teaching and case presentations.”