04.03.14
Out-of-hours care service transfers IT away CCG
East Lancashire Medical Services (ELMS) has “moved its IT out of the hands of the local NHS CCG and into those of a private service provider” to get away from restrictions on what it felt it could do and a perceived “lack of control”.
The company is a social enterprise delivering urgent primary care out of hours from seven sites.
Craig Winters, IT and systems manager at ELMS, said: “We were frustrated and felt we lacked the degree of control we needed to deliver IT that both supported our staff and could drive better patient care. Previously there were restrictions on what we could do, changes were slow to happen, and there simply wasn’t the agility, will or resource to help us fully capitalise on today’s technology.”
It has chosen InTechnology Managed Services to deliver its IT infrastructure services, which it hopes will support improvements to patient care. The contract will see ELMS’s IT infrastructure removed from the local CCG and into the hands of InTechnology, part of Redcentric plc, where it will be supported as a managed service.
In addition to IT infrastructure provision, InTechnology is also providing N3 connectivity, IP telephony, managed firewalls, hosted virtual servers and SIP Trunks. This provides ELMS with full control of all systems, enabling it to swap low value housekeeping activities for added value projects that support of both staff and patients.
Winters said: “The switch was remarkably empowering. The new telephone system sits on the network and we’re aggressively mining the call statistics and patterns to help refine our services and ensure patients are getting the quality, speed and accuracy of care that they need. It’s allowing us to better match resourcing to demand and with the seven treatment centres soon to be linked together, we’ll be able to leverage the opportunities and efficiencies within an enlarged but fully connected unit.”
NHE has asked East Lancashire CCG for comment on ELMS' decision.
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