01.10.12
Links for the future
Source: National Health Executive Sept/Oct 2012
NHE discusses a new health IT network in the north east with Darrin Shaw, who leads the Support Services Partnerships that delivers IT for NHS South of Tyne & Wear.
79 NHS organisations across Gateshead and South Tyneside, including GP practices, walk-in centres, hospitals and other health providers, are getting a new ‘futureproof’ computer network known as Healthlinxx aimed at vastly increasing resilience.
The upgrade has been happening this summer and should be complete by March 2013. As of early September, 13 sites had been migrated to the new network, which another 47 due to be done by the end of the year.
It is a five-year contract, worth around £3.5m over that time period. The project has been supported financially by NHS South of Tyne and Wear and NHS Connecting for Health, and is being delivered by the Support Services Partnership and network supplier BT N3.
Leading the implementation is Darrin Shaw, who has a dual role as head of the Support Services Partnership and associate director of Information & ICT at NHS South of Tyne & Wear.
He said: “Historically in Gateshead and South Tyneside they haven’t really had any strategic networking strategy. Over the years, things have grown organically, so as new business requirements have come through, it’s been a case of ‘let’s connect this building to that building’.”
But now Healthlinxx, he said, moves away from a reliance on point-to-point connections and allows easy central management, and makes it very simple to add a new health premises into the network. A big LCD screen in the office, he said, is set up with a network map with alert flashes if a particular part of the network has problems.
“From an operational and management point of view, Healthlinxx makes it an awful lot easier for us to manage changes coming forward but also to maintain the network.”
What’s in a name
They came up with the idea of branding the network as Healthlinxx to ensure all the different NHS organisations being connected felt an affinity and identity with it and each other, he said.
“We’ve been able to really raise the profile with the users, but also it helps raise strategically the importance of this across the health economy, which all helps with continued investment and so on.
“Most people are connected in some sort of way. At a time of significant change in the NHS, it’s very important to keep the profile of this very high. Different organisations could start believing that the solution for them is to just do their own thing, but then you lose all of the economies of scale and you lose the ability to connect up patient information across pathways as well.”
Benefits
A key reason that the ICT service’s customers want the upgrade is to make things like teleconferencing more reliable, Shaw said, especially between GP practices and the hospital. “The current network configuration we’ve got in place is just not up to the job – it’s not resilient enough, it’s not high performing enough, it’s very fragile and intermittent. The new network will enable a resilient and robust network which will start to allow some of these more modern ways of patient care to be taken forward.
“It also provides a much more resilient network to roll out things like IP telephony, so organisations can be positioned very strongly to take advantage of all of the economies achieved by rolling out IP telephony. Investing in this backbone infrastructure really does open up a lot of cost savings and economies.”
The original implementation timetable was 12-18 months, but Shaw said: “We’re actually finding now, because of the investment and how we’re managing this and controlling it, that we’ve been able to start accelerating the implementation timescales, applying very robust project management to the project.
The partnership with BT N3 “has not all been plain sailing”, Shaw said, but he added: “They generally are responsive when we’ve had any particular issues and we’re working very closely together.”
Tell us what you think – have your say below, or email us directly at [email protected]