NHS Bournemouth & Poole

Teneo helps NHS Bournemouth & Poole improve performance of key applications.

The Adam Practice is an established NHS Doctors practice and part of NHS Bournemouth & Poole. With town centre surgeries in Hamworthy and Poole and smaller sites in Upton and Lytchett its aim is to provide quality healthcare services to all its patients. It is a modern healthcare provider running a range of IT and clinical applications with a large volume of patient data which needs to be accessed quickly.

The main surgery in Hamworthy has a 10 Mbps connection and its 3 branch sites have 1 Mbps connections. Patient data is accessed using EMIS LV, a clinical application with approximately 25 users and other applications running over the network include Sage, anti-virus software, a practice Intranet and Internet and e-mail services provided by the PCT.

Wide Area Network traffic largely comprises scanned documents in TIF format and MS Word documents. These are stored at the main Hamworthy surgery and accessed by all 3 branches via a VPN.

The Challenge

Improve performance of applications.

Healthcare is constantly evolving and it is imperative that the practice keeps ahead of developments in technology in order to deliver the best quality of care to patients. Like most of the NHS it is continually seeking to make staff more productive while controlling costs.

Chris Johnson, IT Manager from The Adam Practice needed to ensure the technology addressed the challenges of real time patient care with limited investment resources.

The key issues we faced were with the duration of time it took to load attachments and the 'sluggishness' of shared documents passed across the network.

The solution

Teneo’s expert engineers deploy and configure Riverbed Steelhead appliances.

By accelerating network performance across the WAN, Riverbed's solutions can help healthcare facilities share information faster and reduce bandwidth utilization by 60% to 95%. This eliminates the need for costly bandwidth upgrades.

Chris recalls, Initially we looked at increasing bandwidth but this was not economically viable. Riverbed offered a cost effective solution that really worked. Unlike a bandwidth upgrade it would provide a long term answer to our problems rather than a quick fix.

Teneo’s experienced engineers performed the installations and ensured the appliances were fine tuned to deliver the maximum possible performance improvement.

The support and service we received was fantastic. Teneo configured the Steelheads quickly and efficiently and everything ran smoothly and according to plan. noted Chris.

The trial clearly demonstrated Riverbed’s ability to increase application performance when opening applications. Prior to the deployment of Riverbed a 6 Mbyte Sage document took over a minute to open.

With the Riverbed units in place this was reduced to just 8 seconds - a 9 times improvement. The time taken to open a Word document from within EMIS was reduced from 15 seconds to 8 seconds.

Riverbed works by removing duplicate data sent across a wide area link, so reducing the amount of bandwidth used and increasing the performance of the
application. The trial demonstrated an overall average data reduction of 72% over the trial period.

The results

Riverbed Steelhead appliances delivered dramatic application performance increases.

The benefits

A cost effective solution that has improved efficiency, productivity and ultimately patient care.

Following the conclusion of the trial, The Adam Practice went ahead with a full purchase of Riverbed from Teneo, rolling the solution out to all 4 sites with a combination of Steelhead 200 and Steelhead 1020 units. Riverbed has provided the practice with the solution needed to improve the efficiency, accuracy, and effectiveness of its information technology.

The practice has seen a significant improvement in access to scanned documents with download times reduced from over a minute to just a few seconds.

Prior to the Riverbed installation the practice calculated that it took an average of 30 seconds to open any file across the network. After installation this was reduced to 10 seconds, showing a 3 times improvement in application performance.

Like most NHS PCT practices we are under continuing pressure to adopt the latest technologies to improve quality of service while also minimizing expenditure. Riverbed Steelheads have enabled us to rise to our technology challenges, enabling us to utilise our IT effectively and enable the Practice to deliver quality, timely care. concluded Chris.