Humber trust first to move Dedalus Care Suite EPR to the cloud

Humber Teaching NHS Foundation Trust was the first NHS trust to go live with the Dedalus Care Suite EPR and has reported enhanced performance of its electronic patient record (EPR).

With the trust’s strategy being to move core applications to the cloud, the platform has provided a secure and flexible cloud service that the trust is leveraging, with the ability to securely host patient-identifiable data.

The trust is now also benefiting from a set of common shared platform services such as remote access, deployment automation, network security, and monitoring.

The platform is hosted on Amazon Public Cloud and leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud Computing Services and AWS Managed Services (AMS).

This provides the trust with a highly-resilient secure service leveraging multiple ‘availability zones’, within AWS Public Cloud.

In addition to Humber, all other NHS trusts who are using Dedalus EPR now also have the opportunity to benefit from the ability to flex their data processing power at a local level.

Through the cloud service the analysis of transactions and processes enables compute power to be tailored for an individual needs.

And greater flexibility from being on the cloud means that NHS trusts can benefit from making local choices relating to upgrades, configuration, and training.

For example additional training environments can be stood up quickly to reflect peak training periods and a trust can choose when to do required upgrades.

Cloud computing provides proven and easily-accessible capabilities, increasing the pace of innovation and unlocking the potential of health data

Lee Rickles, Yorkshire & Humber Care Record programme director and chief information officer, said: “There are a wealth of benefits that come from moving applications to the cloud.

“We are seeing reduced costs, better security and reliability, as well as greater flexibility, performance, scalability, and availability.”

Delivering the solution in the cloud means that outages will no longer be required to support disaster recovery testing and the adoption of security patches.

This ability to continuously adopt platform releases and patches provides the trust with an evergreen service delivering improved performance, new capabilities, features, and an enhanced level of resilience and security through global surveillance centre services.

The Dedalus Healthcare Cloud service also includes an additional layer of security through a ‘digital fortress’ by preventing access at the trust instance level.

This is in addition to the perimeter protection already in place at the data centre level.

Colin Henderson, regional general manager for Dedalus UK & Ireland, said: “Cloud computing has a major role in the future of healthcare.

“It provides proven and easily-accessible capabilities, increasing the pace of innovation and unlocking the potential of health data.

“And the cloud unlocks many more possibilities for data-driven care as we move into an era that is beyond the traditional EPR, utilising open standards to share information readily.”