ANS & East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust: Delivering Better Patient Outcomes Through Cloud
Watch the video: East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust
Background
East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust provides hospital and community care to over half a million people living in East Sussex, with 8,700 members of staff delivering services from two acute hospitals in Hastings and Eastbourne, three community hospitals in Bexhill, Rye and Uckfield, over 100 community sites.
Challenge
East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust made the decision to transition to a cloud-first technology strategy to ensure that both healthcare providers and patients have easy access to the right clinical systems at the point of care. The Trust realised the need to transition its large existing on-premises data centre estate onto the cloud to take advantage of the greater scalability, flexibility and technical capabilities it provides.
However, East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust had limited experience in working with the cloud, and needed a reliable, trusted partner to take them on the journey.
Solution
East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust engaged with Microsoft, which recommended several Gold partners, including ANS. After a competitive tender process, the Trust decided ANS best met its requirements.
The ANS team immediately got to work, starting initially with a cloud migration bringing East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust’s Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system onto Azure.
The Trust also utilised ANS’ Cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE) to help build PLEXUS – a Sussex-wide Shared Care Record service – entirely inhouse and cloud-natively. The Cloud CoE gave the Trust access to ANS’ Azure platform technical experts, without which completion of the system would not have been possible.
Outcomes
With ANS’ support, the small cloud team at East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust has migrated and delivered numerous systems, including the EPR and PLEXUS. Without the support of ANS’ Cloud CoE, the Trust would not have been able to deliver these projects with its existing skillset.
PLEXUS in particular has been a huge success. By linking up different technical systems at different trusts, PLEXUS allows clinicians and patients alike to retrieve information about the individual patient’s journey in a single place. This helps clinicians make better, more informed decisions at the point of care, and ensures patients received better outcomes.
“What made ANS stand out was their professionalism. They made me feel like they understood our problems and knew how we could solve them. ANS clearly has expertise in all things Azure, whether it be moving servers into a cloud environment, or moving data into a cloud environment.”
Andy Bissenden – Associate Director of Digital, East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust
The Future
ANS is now working with East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust with knowledge transfer to upskill its existing cloud team so that they can take on more of the development and maintenance of cloud services. Similarly, ANS is helping the Trust bring its on-premises teams on the journey, so that the entire organisation can play a part in the benefits the cloud can bring to clinicians and patients alike.
“I can only see the relationship between the Trust and ANS growing in the future. We’ve already achieved so much. One of the main things is collaboration, which is really good. If I propose a new way of working, then ANS are able to work with me on that.”
Darren Cumber – Cloud Technical Lead, East Sussex NHS Healthcare Trust
