One of the largest NHS Trusts, University College London Hospitals (UCLH) saw more than 160,000 in-patients and over 950,000 out-patient appointments across its six London-based hospitals in the last year.
The Trust’s ICT team has an obligation to users and patients to deliver robust and secure services that will allow frontline practitioners to effectively carry out their work. IT’s fundamental role is to enable the Trust’s delivery of top-quality patient care, and world-class research and education.
The ICT team works hard to constantly improve the levels of system availability, performance and service quality across the Trust’s technical estate while continuously looking for ways to reduce costs and free up resources.
Several parts of UCLH’s technical estate, such as its service desk, are outsourced. The ICT team required greater intelligence on the performance and utilisation of IT assets across its entire estate to improve efficiency and better plan for longer-term strategic investments.
According to Ronnie Skillen, ICT service transition manager at UCLH, “Having access to accurate information supports good decision-making. This allows us to improve our technical estate, the management of our suppliers, and the delivery of services to users and patients.”
The intelligence provided by Nexthink’s IT analytics offers an end-user’s perspective of the Trust’s IT system in real-time, allowing the ICT team to monitor, manage and proactively respond to performance and security issues wherever they occur, tackling them before they become problems.
In its first year, Nexthink has helped UCLH’s ICT department take a more practical approach to incident management, security, and the rationalisation of its technical estate, enabling it to become a more intelligent procurer of services and products.
“Since its implementation in January 2014, Nexthink has rapidly enabled us to become a more proactive provider of technical services,” says Mark Taglietti, head of ICT service delivery and vendor management at UCLH, “It has proven beneficial across a number of areas including incident management, sustainability, security and cost reduction.”
An example of the return on investment seen by UCLH is in its PC estate where, previously, it had paid for a service where PCs were automatically refreshed every four years. With Nexthink’s IT analytics in place, PC performance is monitored on a day-to-day basis.
Those devices that aren’t performing properly can be eliminated, and the Trust is better able to upgrade assets when needed and make more targeted investments going forward.
Insight into individual Windows XP users has allowed Skillen and his team to successfully plan and manage an aggressive migration to Windows 7. By easily identifying PCs which hadn’t been refreshed, the team was able to make a case-by-case decision on whether a low cost hardware or operating system upgrade to Windows 7 was required, a new PC, or a replacement machine from refurbished stock.
Nexthink’s implementation has also benefited the Trust’s IT security. Being able to quickly and proactively identify batches of PCs infected by malware undiscovered by existing security tools means the ICT team can prioritise its mitigation tactics, often identifying and isolating vulnerabilities before users are even aware of them.
According to Skillen, “Nexthink eases the way of supporting the IT environment, whilst improving the delivery of information to users. This translates to not only a better user experience, but also an improved patient experience throughout the health service.”
For further information please contact Simon Judges - [email protected]