NHS Transformation enabled by a Cloud Managed Service
by Josh Middleton
A recently published NHS England Board paper, titled Technology & Innovation in the NHS, shared progress in the key digital transformation areas of Digitise, Connect and Transform care. The focus to date has primarily been on the digitise and connect areas of the strategy; identifying and implementing the enabling infrastructure across the health and care system to enable it to function more safely, effectively and sustainably. Once these foundations have been laid, the NHS can exploit these innovations in technology to transform the health and care system.
The intended outcomes for the NHS are: a digitised health and care system with digitally recorded information flowing seamlessly and more easily accessible for all stakeholders, improved patient care and enabling patients to access healthcare services in a digital format, allowing them to receive care when and where they need it.
Cloud Managed Service providers such as Dedalus have a huge part to play in achieving these outcomes; enabling the NHS to adopt innovative technologies and stay up to date with changing regulations. A managed service via the cloud can support care organisations by providing digital solutions that are scalable, dynamic and secure. With reliable infrastructure scalable to handle significant volumes of data and traffic, providers can deliver more accessible digital healthcare services to a wider population. Cloud services and solutions create opportunities to provide remote consultations, telemedicine and connected care solutions, empowering patients to manage their own health and reducing wait times for appointments, all of which are crucial in the post-pandemic era.
Taking advantage of the interoperability benefits provided by the cloud, NHS organisations can more easily share information and connect with one another.
Pooling patient data and medical records in centralised, accessible yet secure virtual spaces, such as open data registries, as well as integrating disparate healthcare solutions enhances the quality of care provided and enables faster access to vital information resulting in quicker diagnoses, treatments and better patient outcomes overall.
We support NHS organisations in their digital transformation journey and today provide a fully managed service via the cloud for over 40 NHS organisations. In less than 18 months we successfully migrated 170 hospitals and 20 million patients onto the Healthcare Cloud hosted by Dedalus, with minimal service disruption.
By embracing cloud technologies and allowing us to take responsibility for the day-to-day management of their IT operations and infrastructure, our customers have given themselves the foundation to Digitise, Connect and Transform the way they provide health and care services, whilst freeing up their skilled resources to focus on frontline care delivery and deliver better patient outcomes, enhance patient engagement and improve operational efficiencies, safe in the knowledge that their core digital infrastructure and solutions are: secure, resilient to failure, agile to change, interoperable with cloud native and on-prem solutions and services, scalable at ease, more accessible and finally, experiencing performance improvements!
Our managed service via the Dedalus Healthcare Cloud enables NHS customers to fulfil the Transformation Directive and deliver the desired outcomes of better patient care and accessibility of healthcare services, laying a foundation for further opportunities to innovate and exploit technology advancements.
Josh has been in the healthcare sector for 12 years, having worked for specialist healthcare and technology organisations. Initially a client focused project manager with experience delivering software development, application deployment, infrastructure and cloud migration projects. More recently he has entered a client engagement role, working with existing and new customers on the adoption of cloud technologies and managed services.