Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (LHCH) has installed a number of EMC solutions to improve the delivery of first-class patient care through faster access to comprehensive patient information and to underpin a new electronic patient health record (EHR) system.
Through EMC VNX unified storage solutions, clinicians now have faster access to validated patient records via a centralised system, meaning that patient documents -including notes, histories, prescriptions, diagnoses and images across all departments – can be accessed by multiple approved staff members simultaneously. This empowers staff to work faster, react more quickly and access the right document at the right time for increased patient safety. Especially important during emergencies, staff no longer have to search for hard copies of MRIs, X-Rays or charts to make informed decisions
Previously, LHCH’s siloed IT system meant mission-critical patient care applications, used to support radiology, cardiology and financial, HR, and administrative data, were stored on over 80 servers and an HP EVA platform.
Since deploying EMC solutions, including EMC Avamar, EMC RecoverPoint, a single EMC Atmos® cloud storage platform and two EMC VNX unified storage solutions with EMC FAST™ Suite and flash drives, the Trust has been able to transform the way it operates. The hospital has achieved savings of ?60,000 a year in IT costs by removing the need for four maintenance contracts. This has allowed the IT team to focus their efforts on working on critical tasks and further improving services rather than maintaining systems. The project has also reduced cooling and power costs by 25% at its primary data centre.
Historical patient information and vital administrative data, crucial for providing patients with the most suitable care, has been made instantly available through EMC Atmos, which reliably archives data on low-cost drives. Together with EMC Avamar which automatically back-ups data, back-up time has been reduced from hours to almost instantly and file restores between 30-60 minutes instead of the days it took previously. By continually replicating data between VNX platforms, EMC RecoverPoint securely protects the hospital and assures the resilience of patient records. In the event of an IT disaster, a failover to working infrastructure has been reduced to less than 15 minutes, further ensuring the continuity of patient care excellence.
EMC’s solutions have enabled the Trust to future-proof the hospital’s investment, scaling to meet the growing data storage, performance and back-up requirements. As a result the hospital has the ability to scale storage for the next five to seven years to meet its increasing data needs.
