Data centre to improve care
Centralising data services in the South Eastern trust will help professionals to obtain patient information more quickly across its area.
A new data centre facility for the South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust has been opened by Health Minister Edwin Poots at the Ulster Hospital. The South Eastern area covers the Ards, Down, Lisburn and North Down districts.
“This new infrastructure will enable the trust to modernise and improve its delivery of services to patients without being constrained by ICT capabilities,” Poots stated. “As they move within and between different locations, clinicians will have immediate access to patient information. This will give professional staff more time to spend with patients and ensure that the appropriate care can be delivered in the right place and at the right time.”
The two performance optimised data (POD) centres, which have been developed by Hewlett Packard (HP), in association with BT, will improve IT services for the trust’s four hospitals and 120 additional facilities and save physical space and IT overhead spending.
The HP POD is a cloud solution which provides a single virtual data centre environment for all the trust’s operations. A virtual desktop infrastructure will enable clinicians to access patient information from any location, using any device. The trust also intends rolling out a ‘bring your own device’ and mobility strategy across its area over the coming months.
Poots concluded: “The programme of transformation which is currently underway across the health and social care sector represents a significant organisational and operational challenge. In this climate of change, it is imperative that the opportunities presented by innovative technologies are maximised. It is also essential that our organisations have the ICT infrastructure both to improve efficiency and productivity and to support changing business needs.”
Stephen Stewart, the trust’s Assistant Director Technology and Telecommunications, commented that demand for IT services in the healthcare sector has “grown exponentially” in recent years but hospitals are not designed to house data centres.
“We have centralised all server support for the trust at the Ulster Hospital, which is undergoing a rebuild,” he added. “Originally this included the provision of two new bricks-and mortar data centres but instead of putting an expensive data centre in each of the new buildings, we have located two containerised HP PODs right next to them. From day one, we know that the HP PODs will deliver scalable capacity to meet our compute requirement for the next seven to ten years.”
