EMC has announced that Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (LHCH) has installed a number of its solutions to improve the delivery of first-class patient care through faster access to comprehensive patient information and to underpin a new electronic patient health record (EHR) system.
Through EMC VNX unified storage solutions, clinicians now have faster access to validated patient records via a centralised system, meaning that patient documents -including notes, histories, prescriptions, diagnoses and images across all departments – can be accessed by multiple approved staff members simultaneously. This empowers staff to work faster, react more quickly, and access the right document at the right time for increased patient safety. Especially important during emergencies, staff no longer have to search for hard copies of MRIs, X-Rays or charts to make informed decisions.
Previously, LHCH’s siloed IT system meant mission-critical patient care applications, used to support radiology, cardiology and financial, HR, and administrative data, were stored on more than 80 servers and an HP EVA platform.
Since deploying EMC solutions, including EMC Avamar, EMC RecoverPoint, a single EMC Atmos cloud storage platform and two EMC VNX unified storage solutions with EMC FAST Suite and flash drives; the trust has been able to transform the way it operates. The hospital has achieved savings of £60,000 a year in IT costs by removing the need for four maintenance contracts. This has allowed the IT team to focus their efforts on working on critical tasks and further improving services rather than maintaining systems. The project has also reduced cooling and power costs by 25% at its primary data centre.
Historical patient information and vital administrative data, crucial for providing patients with the most-suitable care, has been made instantly available through EMC Atmos, which reliably archives data on low-cost drives. Together with EMC Avamar, which automatically back-ups data, back-up time has been reduced from hours to almost instantly and file restores between 30-60 minutes instead of the days it took previously. By continually replicating data between VNX platforms, EMC RecoverPoint securely protects the hospital and assures the resilience of patient records. In the event of an IT disaster, a failover to working infrastructure has been reduced to less than 15 minutes, further ensuring the continuity of patient care excellence.
EMC’s solutions have enabled the trust to futureproof the hospital’s investment, scaling to meet the growing data storage, performance and back-up requirements. As a result the hospital has the ability to scale storage for the next five to seven years to meet its increasing data needs.
Dave Murphy, head of information technology at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, said: “In order for medical staff to make the most-appropriate decisions to improve a patient’s wellbeing, they need all of the necessary information at their fingertips. This is especially true in a critical context where decisions need to be made quickly and accurately. It is simply not acceptable for staff to receive a delayed response when requesting patient data or experience difficulties when multiple members try to access the same information simultaneously.
“By teaming up with EMC, we’ve been able to make these issues a thing of the past. With data centrally available, multiple staff can access patient history, scans and patient test results simultaneously across departments. This means that doctors and nurses are better informed on a patient’s care and progress.
“This collaborative IT transformation project has allowed us to retain our top spot in the Care Quality Commission’s National Inpatient Survey for the seventh time in eight years. We’ve also been ranked by the Clinical Digital Maturity Index, a benchmarking tool indicating how IT can improve patient safety and deliver efficiencies, as joint number one hospital trust in the UK – which speaks volumes for the success of this project.”
James Norman, UK public sector chief information officer at EMC, added: “Being able to help an already-efficient and top-ranking hospital trust even further in its endeavours to improve patient care through technology has been a rewarding project. At EMC we truly believe in the power of getting to the root of a customer’s problems in order to find the right solutions that offer the best outcomes. It gives us great satisfaction to know that LHCH has been able to reduce the overall cost of ownership and can now operate safer due to the reliability and support that EMC technology provides.”
