Partnering together to achieve exceptional outcomes for patients

Computacenter and Dell Technologies deliver a stable, scalable infrastructure enabling Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust to fulfil their key priority of delivering electronic patient records.

This new system ensures that patients get the best possible care throughout their journey through the hospital and community care infrastructure. Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust provides hospital-based services from three main sites in Redditch, Kidderminster and Worcester and turns over around £460m pa. They serve almost 600,000 people and, in 2020, provided care to around 240,000 different patients. The Trust employs nearly 6,000 people, has 800 volunteers, and delivers 42 sub-specialties, whilst also running two Type One Emergency Departments.

Objective

Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust wanted to deploy an electronic patient record (EPR) system to improve care services. The Trust had to overhaul its legacy IT infrastructure and find a solution that could support the EPR alongside other digital healthcare solutions in the future.

Solution

Starting with an infrastructure assessment to help IT build a business case for transforming the old hardware and to collect data needed to design a replacement infrastructure, Computacenter delivered a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution that underpins the Trust’s EPR system and other digital healthcare systems.

The Trust replaced the legacy technology with VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, the jointly engineered HCI by Dell Technologies and VMware. With its partner competencies, Computacenter was able to deliver a highly efficient, end-to-end service, co-delivering the solution with Dell Technologies. It implemented 24 VxRail nodes in total, with 12 nodes each across its Redditch and Worcester sites, connected by a dedicated wide area network link.

Outcome

As a result of this infrastructure transformation, the Trust has gained the performance to deliver its EPR goals, as well as future digital solutions. It also consolidated its hardware, improving manageability and reducing power usage for greater sustainability. The new solution is providing healthcare staff with 50% faster access to patient admin data, enabling them to provide better patient services with access to digital care records from bedsides and streamlined patient journeys with 24x7 access to care systems.