Case study: network services

Sussex Healthcare Informatics Service remotely manages 22,000 networked devices

Sussex Health Informatics Service (HIS) has completed a rollout of the world's largest deployment of Novell’s ZENworks that supports the network services for some 22,000 devices and 36,000 users across ten NHS Trusts in Sussex. The project, which began at the end of 2006, was implemented by Novell-partner and NHS technology specialists, Healthcare Integration Partners (Healthcare IP).

In 2004 Sussex Health Informatics Service (HIS) was formed to provide centralised IT services, governance, project management, training, change management and strategy to NHS trusts across the county. These include 4 primary care trusts, 7 main hospitals, 280 GP surgery sites, a mental health trust and South Downs Health NHS Trust.

The creation of Sussex HIS brought together disparate systems with no standardised software environment. The organisation had no way of managing the inherited estate of software and hardware, or of benchmarking its performance against the newly-introduced NHS Infrastructure Maturity Model (NIMM).

Commenting Steve Orman, Technical Director at Sussex HIS said, “From day one we set about creating an information management and technology (IM&T) environment that met the needs of the now ten individual members, and the collective requirements to support patient care across organisational boundaries, in line with the NHS objective of ‘joined up care’.

"This was a massive task — we were starting from a position of no county-wide network, no asset management, no way of managing desktop deployment, no single directory service and no remote management. We needed a cost-effective solution that could be delivered quickly across a disparate and changing environment, with minimum impact to existing in-house resource.

"Our options were to introduce Microsoft SMS or Novell’s ZENworks; utilise differing products to deliver requirement, or do nothing. The latter really wasn’t an option, so after extensive research and consultation we chose ZCM. This solution, which was implemented with Healthcare IP, also had to be managed alongside the creation of a new high-speed Sussex-wide Community of Interest Network (COIN) which would facilitate cross-organisational and county-wide working.”

Following the first-phase deployment of ZENworks Inventory and Desktop Management components to more than 200 PCs across the east of the region, Healthcare IP proved product capability with a successful pilot in October 2007.

“We needed to know that the product would allow us to remotely control PCs, particularly those located in GP surgeries. We had been spending an unprecedented amount of time and money sending engineers out to GP sites to resolve sometimes simple technical issues. So the pilot included an exercise which allowed us to take secured control of a GP’s PC — that demonstration alone secured the county-wide roll-out,” Steve continues.

“I’m passionate in my belief that IT should enable rather than disable patient care, and expected ZENworks to provide the foundations for transforming the way in which knowledge, management information and online information services can be accessed by operational user, managers, clinicians and the public.”

The Sussex-wide roll-out of ZCM continued before coming up against a scalability ceiling in March 2008. This event was unforeseen and the project stalled whilst a solution and enhancements were developed — deployment re-commenced after a 3-month delay, with successful completion reached in May 2009.

“Bearing in mind the scale of this project, we were trail-blazing for the NHS. Essentially we forged a partnership between Connecting for Health (CFH), Novell and the NHS.”

CFH is the agency of the Department for Health that supports the NHS to deliver better, safer care to patients by bringing in new IT systems and services. By setting standards and through centralised evaluation and purchasing of software CFH is able to save the NHS millions of pounds every year.

“ZENworks is made available to the NHS free of charge by CFH, as part of its Enterprise Agreement — the fact that CFH had already evaluated the product and was funding licensing were both important to our solution selection, but they were by no means the only consideration. Both Healthcare IP and Novell had to prove themselves as organisations that we could work with,”

Steve concludes, “Healthcare IP has an unparalleled understanding of the challenges faced by the NHS and of ZENworks. ZCM has taken us from a position of chaos and ignorance, to one of intelligence and agility. Sussex HIS now has a genuine, reliable representation of its estate for both hardware and software, The ability to remote-manage PCs has been key to improving the ‘first time fix rate’ on the service desk and, crucially we are now able to deliver key applications quickly and efficiently. It says something when the product becomes a verb in your team’s vocabulary — I'll Zen it!”

“With ZCM we are meeting and exceeding targeted KPIs, achieving up to level 4 NIMM. As a result of our experiences I am keen to see ZENworks embedded within the NHS as a whole. Thereby opening up the opportunity to extend the use of ZCM to include products such as Patch and Asset management”

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