Imerja, in partnership with Insight (UK), has been selected by Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust to provide IT infrastructure for its new-build hospital, and wide-ranging IT support in a five-year contract win worth upwards of £2.5m.
With building work for the new hospital site underway, Imerja will install secure IT infrastructure across the campus, which will cover the hospital’s LAN, wireless LAN, telephony and unified communications solutions. The company will also provide a fully-managed service across the infrastructure for a five-year term, liaising with the hospital’s internal IT teams to provide performance monitoring, fault diagnosis and rectification, as well as problem and change management for the trust’s new hospital and peripheral sites.
World leaders in healthcare and research, Alder Hey provides care for over 200,000 children every year and relies heavily on a complex IT infrastructure.
The project, ‘Alder Hey in the park’, will be a specialist children’s hospital built inside the trust’s park grounds and aims to create a relaxing environment for patients while they receive expert care. The hospital is the first of its kind in Europe and is set to open in 2015, with the trust turning to Imerja to provide support for its ‘hospital of the future’.
Cathy Fox, associate sirector of informatics at Alder Hey, said: “We are delighted to be working with Imerja to implement cutting-edge, robust technologies in our new hospital. These core services will underpin day-to-day activities across the trust and will include a focus on improving the experience for our patients and their families. This will include dedicated wi-fi which will be available free of charge across the trust.”
Imerja works extensively within the healthcare sector and this latest win builds on an existing relationship with Alder Hey. The firm currently provides a range of hosted services from its datacentre in Lancashire and a round-the-clock clinical service desk managing incidents and problems for the existing hospital. It has also deployed the Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) used in Alder Hey’s neurosciences department. The VaaS technology enables medical staff to communicate with patients, and vice versa, via high-definition video links, resulting in the provision of accessible care regardless of patient or doctor location.
Ian Jackson, managing director and co-founder of Imerja, said: “We are extremely proud to be associated with this prestigious project. We know the healthcare sector and are acutely aware of the pressures, the budget constraints and how critical the patient experience is, and this has been reflected within our solution. The work done at Alder Hey Children’s Hospital can be life changing, so it’s crucial that we ensure everything works smoothly.”